Richard Hodson Receives Campus Safety Award

Richard Hodson, ECE Senior Web Developer, has been selected to receive a Campus Safety Award from NC State’s Environmental Health and Safety Department and Eastman Chemical Company.

Richard Hodson, ECE Senior Web Developer, has been selected to receive a Campus Safety Award from NC State’s Environmental Health and Safety Department and Eastman Chemical Company.

The award is given to NC State staff members who have demonstrated the best practices for cultivating a safe working environment within their department. Hodson received this award at the Occupational Safety and Health Council meeting on October 28. He was awarded a plaque and $1,000 toward the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering for the advancement of safety practices. 

Hodson was nominated by ECE Director of IT & Operations Dan Green. Green explained the extensive and impressive safety measures Hodson took at the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Hodson created the WolfTech RoomSign application which allowed units on campus to check occupants in and out of buildings and rooms with their cell phones and a customized QR code. The system provided a record that was used for contact tracing and provided a way for lab users to track a room’s current usage to improve social distancing.

Over 850 different doors on campus register for his WolfTech RoomSign system. This included usage from NC State facility coordinators, IT staff, classroom coordinators, and research and teaching lab managers. 

Users were so excited by the system that they requested even more safety features to be added, including:

• additional reporting mechanisms
• the ability to share room management amongst their colleagues
• the option for room managers to checkout users who forgot to
• the ability for not just UnityID support but Brickyard account users to be able to check-in
• themed error pages
• room viewing option (who’s currently using it)
• search portal for Health Services so specific NC State Health professionals can search for specific people within a specific timeframe and also find people that have had a direct overlap with a searched-for user at some point in the entered date range.

The system went live on March 16, 2020, demonstrating how quickly and efficiently Hodson worked once the pandemic required lockdowns. Since then, over 52,000 individual check-in/checkout sessions were recorded in the following 18 months.

Hodson is a Web programmer in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and is a member of the WolfTech IT Group. His primary duty is to support of GradWatch, the College of Engineering’s graduate student lifecycle software. GradWatch is an essential tool for faculty and graduate programs staff within the College, and Richard makes sure that it is well-maintained and running efficiently. In addition, Richard supports the campus digital signage solution – Billboard – and has assisted with numerous research efforts within the department.

Congratulations to Richard Hodson for his recognition in campus safety, and thank you for all you do!