The selection panel awarded Dr Jérôme Lavoué, Lawrence Joseph, Peter Knott, Hugh Davies, France Labrèche, Frédéric Clerc, Gautier Mater and Tracy Kirkham for their paper entitled “Expostats: A Bayesian Toolkit to Aid the Interpretation of Occupational Exposure Measurements”, published in Volume 63, Issue 3, April 2019.

The winning paper is an outstanding example of how research can be translated into practice, enabling the professional practitioner community to apply state of the art scientific methods to advance workers’ health and safety.

Expostats is a free computer application that includes three tools tailored to specific questions about occupational exposure data commonly asked by occupational hygienists, such as: Is a group of workers compliant with an occupational exposure limit? Are some individuals within this group likely to experience substantially higher exposure than its average member? How does an intervention influence the distribution of exposures? Expostats incorporates key concepts in contemporary exposure assessment – similar exposure groups, exceedance fractions, censored data, lognormal distributions, repeated measurements, and Bayesian analysis – in a user-friendly interface, enabling occupational hygienists to perform state of the art analyses of exposure data without advanced training in biostatistics or computer programming. Expostats can be accessed at www.expostats.ca for use through a web application or as an offline standalone application.

Dr Rachael Jones, Chief Editor of the Annals of Work Exposures and Health commented, “Dr Lavoué and his co-authors are well-deserving of this award. Not only is Expostats an important contribution to the field of occupational hygiene, but the paper effectively uses graphics and text to explain complex concepts in a way that is accessible to a diverse audience. In particular, the provided examples are practical and include concrete descriptions of the meaning of Expostats outputs. I encourage occupational hygienists to utilize Expostats in their professional practice and teaching.”

The Bedford Prize, awarded every two years, was introduced in 1967 and named after BOHS first President, Dr. Thomas Bedford. 16 excellent papers from Volumes 62 (2018) and 63 (2019) were nominated for the 2020 award. You can find more information on the Bedford Prize here.