Jeanne Jackson DeVoe

January 28, 2025

Title & Department: Department Safety Officer, Occupational Safety & Health Division, Environment, Safety & Health Department

Year started at PPPL: 2019

As a department safety officer at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), Haley Wetzel’s job is to delve into how researchers perform their experiments so she can work with them to determine procedures that will help them conduct their research in the safest possible way.

Wetzel said she enjoys talking to researchers and has learned to ask the right questions so she understands the unique safety concerns of experiments at PPPL and can help staff members understand those concerns as well. That often involves implementing safety regulations aimed at keeping staff safe.

It’s a job that is challenging and multifaceted, Wetzel said. “The hazards are different for research experiments, but safety is safety,” Wetzel said. “It’s trying to prevent the possibility of any hazard, whether it’s chemical exposure or compressed gas. I had to learn a little bit more about the experiments. I had to do research myself. It was a lot of communication — making sure I went out to talk to people with very different communication styles.”

The safety team has grown over the past five years from just four people, including Wetzel, to eight people in the Occupational Safety & Health Division and another four in the Construction & Project Safety Division.

Helped establish an employee resource group aimed at professional development

Wetzel is one of the founders of the Young Professionals Network, an employee resource group that began in 2019. The group, which is open to people of all ages, sponsors a variety of professional development and networking events. “It was something that didn’t exist when I started, so that’s been something to see how it’s grown,” she said.

Wetzel grew up in the small town of Indiana, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, and attended Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where she received a bachelor’s degree in safety, health and environmental applied sciences. Wetzel earned a master’s degree in business administration in 2023 through a hybrid program at Youngstown State University in Ohio. She is a certified safety professional through the Board of Certified Safety Professionals. 

Wetzel’s first job as a safety professional was as an intern at W.L. Gore & Associates Inc., in Elkton, Maryland, which manufactures waterproof GORE-TEX fabrics. After graduating, she worked as a safety representative at Kerry, an artificial flavorings company in Clark, New Jersey. Before coming to PPPL, Wetzel was an environment, health and safety coordinator at Reckitt, a manufacturing company that produces Lysol and other products, in Hillsborough, New Jersey.  

In 2020, Wetzel, along with most of the PPPL staff, transitioned to working remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. She and other safety members were considered essential employees and were among the first to return to work on-site after three months of working from home.

Wetzel worked with staff members in PPPL’s Facilities and Site Services Department and with staff on the Lab’s main fusion experiment, the National Spherical Torus Experiment-Upgrade, during her first two years at PPPL. She has since worked with researchers in PPPL’s Discovery Plasma Science Department on experiments that include the Facility for Laboratory Reconnection Experiments (FLARE), a collaborative research facility studying magnetic reconnection that is currently under construction. She also works with staff in the Applied Materials and Sustainability Sciences Directorate on several research facilities, including the Quantum Diamond Laboratory, which studies and refines the process of using plasma to produce high-quality diamond materials for quantum sensors and other devices.
 

Talking with people throughout the Laboratory 

A self-described introvert, Wetzel said interacting with different people in various departments makes her job interesting. On any given day, she might be taking part in a pre-job briefing on FLARE, completing paperwork to approve a chemical being used in an experiment or around the Lab, or researching the latest experimental regulations. Her day-to-day responsibilities also include mentoring Dylan Palmer, who is PPPL’s first safety inspector apprentice through the Lab’s apprenticeship program, which provides on-the-job training and education to early career staff in technical fields.

Wetzel noted the Laboratory has grown from about 600 people five years ago to about 780 today as PPPL expands its mission to include not only helping to develop fusion energy but also using its expertise in plasma to contribute to such fields as microelectronics, quantum sensors and devices, and sustainability sciences. “It’s been very exciting to see how it is now compared to when I first started,” she said. 

Wetzel said she believes PPPL has always had a strong safety culture, which has become even stronger over the past few years as the Laboratory has added new research projects and prepares to begin construction on a new building: the Princeton Plasma Innovation Center. 

“I think staff like working at the Lab — they want to see it succeed. They want PPPL to be a place that continues to grow and expand,” Wetzel said. “I think people generally do care about each other at PPPL, and they want to make sure they’re safe and doing their jobs correctly.” 

Wetzel’s efforts to make PPPL safer have been recognized. She won an end-of-the-year RISE Core Values Award in December 2024 for upholding PPPL’s core value of safety: “We are vigilant about safety through training, education and prevention.” 

Wetzel and her husband, Peter Scaglione, live in Trenton, New Jersey.
 

Describe your job: 

“I try to understand work processes and identify what could go wrong that’s involved with the process to identify points where it could fail. I try to plan for those instances and, with that planning, prevent anything happening that would endanger employees.”
 

Three things about yourself:

1. “My husband and I are restoring an old house from the 1860s. We’re putting a lot of the traditional details back into it — things like mantles and trim. We removed the old carpet, and we’ve sanded a lot of the floors and stairs.”
    
2. “I like to bake. I enjoy baking cookies and cakes. It works out well that I can bring them to work.”
    
3. “I like to garden. I like flowers and plants. I find them calming.”
    

What does safety mean to you? 

“Safety keeps people safe from harm. It’s trying to identify areas of concern to prevent any kind of injury. Safety aims to slow people down and get them to evaluate their processes and view them from a different angle. It’s kind of shifting your lens a little bit to think about what could go wrong.”

What does working at PPPL mean to you? 

“I think the mission of the Lab is very important in today’s world. The research we do here can help develop fusion energy; it can help with other sustainable technologies and applications too.”