BYU students Parker Willis, Brin Openshaw, Kaylee Packer, and Jonah Lindsay are one of five global teams to present their call-to-action project at the World Assembly of Occupational Safety and Health 2025.
The World Assembly of Occupational Safety and Health 2025 will be held in Osaka, Japan. This year’s event features a call-to-action project sponsored by the International Labor Organization (ILO). Organizers say the project’s purpose is to focus on “safety, health and well-being for all.”
The event invites students and young industry professionals worldwide to present plans of action aimed at creating a tangible difference in worker safety. The selected teams are allowed to present at the World Assembly of Occupational Safety and Health which runs from July 25 to 27.
When asked what sparked the team's interest in the project, Parker Willis, a current public health student at BYU, said, “That [call-to-action project] aligns pretty well with the Environmental and Occupational Health emphasis, which made it really easy for us… to find a lot of interest in this.”
The project led to four BYU students — Parker Willis, Brin Openshaw, Kaylee Packer, and Jonah Lindsay — teaming up to find a topic and project they thought would make a truly meaningful and beneficial impact.
With the rise in global temperatures with the rise of climate change. Workers face more intense heat waves and the terrible effects of heat exhaustion, dehydration and possibly death with working conditions in this weather.
“We were looking at certain issues that migrant workers and other vulnerable populations faced,” Openshaw said. “That led to our focus on heat-related illness.”
The team’s goal with its call-to-action project was to find a realistic and implementable solution for heat-related illnesses among vulnerable worker populations.
Their solution was a mobile app called CoolClock. An app which uses real time weather data to help give mobile alerts to help promote hydration throughout the work day and when it is best to have workers take breaks.
This app would also be able to help give compliance summaries to employers so they could help as well support their workers in safer scheduling.
This solution was a way for future workers and employers to combine worker-based engagement through an incentive-driven engagement system in the app to incentivize workers to use it daily. Alongside using multi-lingual integration into the app to help elevate the standard for workplace safety on a global scale as climate change continues
The research and development of this project was extensive, with the team starting work back in January 2025, meeting every week to advance the project.
The team conducted individual research and woke up at 2 a.m. to participate in Zoom calls held in Japan by the ILO, which provided guidance for all participants in their projects.
Packer also mentioned, “It was kind of a long process, and I'd say a lot of it was spent just trying to find… the right area that we wanted to work with.”
The project went through multiple iterations as the team focused on the right solution. This included the team completely redoing the project about ten days before it was due.
“We had to redo the project a couple of times,” Lindsay said. “One of the things they talk about in the Ballard Center at BYU is being in love with the problem and not with the solution.”
Through the process of reworking the project, the team found unique and more innovative solutions that they would not have found otherwise.
“We can’t attach ourselves too much to how we’re going to solve the problem because that stops us from acknowledging that there could be some downsides to it,” Lindsay said.
The project was one of only eight projects to be recognized at the World Assembly and Expo 2025. It was also the only project to be selected from the United States.
On being recognized for the project, Willis remarked, “Obviously very flattering… it really speaks to the caliber of people that we had supporting us.”
The team credited the BYU faculty and how their background education played a huge role in this group and this specific project.
Willis also noted, “There’s a lot of credit to be given to our awesome faculty…who have gotten us all to the point of being educated enough to be able to recognize this issue… produce good research and actually apply it to solving real-world solutions."
Looking forward, the team is excited and hopeful to see their research implemented shortly to benefit the lives of workers.
“We spent a lot of time… finding solutions that would… be doable, manageable, and implementable, which we hope then can be actualized throughout the world,” Openshaw said.
The team is incredibly proud of the work, which will be recognized and celebrated alongside the other teams in Osaka, Japan, at the World Assembly and Expo in July.
What these students have already achieved is remarkable, and it only marks the beginning of the incredible work they’ll continue to do in the public health field.