Aaron Potash is the safety coordinator for the Accelerator Technology & Applied Physics (ATAP) Division at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Potash joined Berkeley Lab in 2024. Before that, he worked at Meta’s global Environmental, Health & Safety (EHS) team and Lawrence Livermore National Lab. He is a certified safety professional, a licensed California paramedic, and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. He lives in Oakland and enjoys mountain biking and teaching SCUBA diving in Monterey Bay.

Please tell us about your role and responsibilities.

As ATAP’s division safety coordinator, I serve as a resource for our personnel—helping them seamlessly incorporate Environmental, Health & Safety (EHS) requirements into their work while maintaining responsibility for safety.

What do you most like about your role, and what are your day-to-day challenges?

My favorite part of the role is spending time with our team. I truly value the colleagues I work with and take pride in their accomplishments, while understanding the challenges they encounter. I’m thankful to be welcomed into our research spaces and always aim to contribute value.

The daily challenge is to ensure that EHS requirements are integrated into operations thoughtfully—so they don’t create obstacles, but instead improve the important work our teams do.

What advice would you give to other people in roles like yours?

Be curious and show empathy. There are many rules, regulations, frameworks, and Standard Operating Procedures to guide EHS work—but unless we first aim to understand the world of the people we support, those tools can easily hinder us. Safety occurs most naturally when teams communicate and learn together. Curiosity and empathy create the conditions for that learning to happen.

After all, trust takes time to develop and can be lost quickly—building it gradually through understanding is far easier than trying to repair it once it’s gone.

For more information on ATAP News articles, contact caw@lbl.gov.