UL Research Institutes is a leading independent safety science organization with global reach.

Описание: We sense and act on risks to public safety with bold hypotheses and objective investigations.
Our five research institutes:
Fire Safety Research Institute
Chemical Insights Research Institute
Electrochemical Safety Research Institute
Materials Discovery Research Institute
Digital Safety Research Institute

Through our Office of Research Experiences and Education, we bring the discovery of safety science to middle school students through post-graduates. We create learning pathways through which STEM students discover the science of safety. By coordinating learning experiences alongside experts in our organizations and in related fields, scholars from undergraduate to graduate school have opportunities to learn and become the next generation of experts in their field.

We partner with organizations like Interpol, The World Economic Forum and others at the forefront of safety and sustainability to help make the world a safer place.

We approach our work in the pursuit of three grand challenges:

GRAND CHALLENGE #1 - Building resilience for a sustainable future.

Many solutions to climate change — among them solar panels, storage batteries, and electric vehicles — are technologies. They will play a vital role in driving down global carbon emissions.

But like most technologies, they also have the potential to create unintended consequences. For example, storage batteries are vulnerable to thermal runaway and fire; they also currently require metals like lithium and cobalt, which are often extracted through dangerous mining practices.

Left alone, these and other problems will undermine the world’s transition to a clean energy future.

That is why we are working to build safety into the design, development, and deployment of renewable energy technologies.

GRAND CHALLENGE #2 - Advancing individual and societal health in the 21st century.

New manufactured products and chemicals play an important role in societal progress: They make crops more productive, medicines more effective, and structures more durable, to name just a few benefits. But in most cases, the long-term impact of these chemicals on people, other species, and ecosystems is poorly understood.

What we can say with certainty is that synthetic chemicals are ubiquitous in the world, from the ocean floor to the human bloodstream. Many persist and accumulate in living things, and some can inflict harm in subtle ways over long periods of time.

We are working to bring these chemical concerns to light — focusing in particular on air pollution, electronic cigarettes, 3D printer emissions, and flame retardants, which pose global risks to health.

GRAND CHALLENGE #3 - Promoting safety at the human-digital interface.

We are right now in the early stages of a technological revolution powered by digital intelligence. Artificial intelligence and machine learning have already begun to transform our understanding of disease and human biology; they help fly our planes, staff our companies, and enforce our laws; and experts say there is still more change to come.

We are also becoming familiar with problems in the digital ecosystem, from the erosion of privacy and the misuse of data to black box algorithms that quietly reinforce human biases. It is critical that we solve these problems while the technologies driving them are still nascent.

We aim to do just that, by developing new frameworks for digital safety in partnership with experts worldwide.