Respiratory Protection Committee John M. White Award


John M. White was an active member of the AIHA Respiratory Protection Committee in the early 1980's and an applied-researcher in the field of respiratory protection. John or Jack as his friends called him worked at the Chalk River Nuclear facility in Ontario, Canada. He developed a comprehensive respiratory protection program for the facility and was a researcher in the area of quantitative fit testing at the same time that seminal research was being conducted at the Los Alamos National Laboratory by Ed Hyatt and Alan Hack.

Jack was a founding member of the ACGIH's Respiratory Protection Committee. This committee had become inactive by the late 1970's. He joined the AIHA's Respiratory Protection Committee in the early 1980's. He was a combination of a respirator "Guru" and a mentor to newer members. He had retired from his activities at the Chalk River Nuclear facility by then, but continued to come to our semiannual respiratory protection committee at his own expense. He participated in our various discussions and activities at a time when the Respiratory Protection committee was extremely active in sponsoring and publishing a Respiratory Protection Manual, a Respiratory Protection Monograph and the Compilation of Odor and Taste Thresholds Values Data books.

Jack passed away while still an active member of the Respiratory Protection Committee. It was decided that it would be appropriate to create an award in his memory that would recognize those individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the science of Respiratory Protection. The award has always been given to the authors of the best peer-reviewed article published during the previous year in the AIHA Journal. Larry Birkner was instrumental in chairing the first few subcommittees that awarded this honor and setting up an objective set of criteria for judging the various papers that were published.