VCU news

By Brian McNeill

Tom Briggs, who has led safety and risk management at Virginia Commonwealth University for nearly a decade, recently returned to VCU after a yearlong military deployment in the Middle East and has been named the university’s chief risk officer.

“I am immensely grateful to Tom for his service to our country and am delighted to have him back at VCU,” said Meredith Weiss, Ph.D., senior vice president for finance and administration and chief financial officer. “He is deeply committed to improving VCU’s comprehensive enterprise risk management program in support of VCU’s mission and goals.”

Briggs joined VCU in 2015 as assistant vice president for safety and risk management, leading a team focused on workplace safety, lab safety, insurance risk management and employee health. In that role, he implemented an enterprise risk management process to identify and mitigate potential risks.

Briggs also co-led VCU’s Public Health Response Team that planned and implemented the university’s health and safety program during the pandemic, including the establishment of COVID testing sites, contact tracing, notification protocols and more.

In his new role as chief risk officer, Briggs will develop, implement and oversee a best-practice, comprehensive strategic risk management program supporting the achievement of VCU’s mission and goals. He will lead VCU’s enterprise risk management programming, integrating risk management strategies and practices throughout university operations.

“With enterprise risk management, we identified the strategic institutional risks,” Briggs said. “In this new position, we’ll be working with the risk owners to look at what we’re doing to address those risks, how we measure them, drilling down to a much more granular level.”

With this change, VCU Safety and Risk Management, led by Associate Vice President Michael Cimis, will be renamed VCU Occupational Health and Safety to better reflect its subject-matter expertise and areas of oversight, including biological safety, environmental health and safety, fire safety, insurance, chemical safety, occupational health and safety, radiation safety and employee health.

From February 2024 to February 2025, Briggs, a chief warrant officer with the U.S. Navy, was serving as an intelligence officer deployed to Bahrain to support the analysis and dissemination of technical intelligence related to conventional and improvised threats within the Middle East.

Briggs joined the Navy Reserves in 2005 and is a counterterrorism analyst by training and experience. He is a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, and has served with SEAL teams, the Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit and the Seabees, who are the Navy’s construction and facilities engineering professionals.

“I joined the military because my daughter was a senior in high school on 9/11 and she joined the [Army],” Briggs said, following her lead. “I was so old that the only branch that would take me was the Navy Reserve, and so that’s why I joined the Navy.”

Prior to joining VCU, Briggs established a career focused on safety. He was safety coordinator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City in the late 1990s. He served as director of safety at Madison Square Garden starting in spring 2001, a role that grew to include emergency planning and preparedness, evacuation drills, sheltering plans and threat assessment following 9/11. He also served as director of environmental health and safety at City University of New York – College of Staten Island and as director of environmental health and safety at the University of Central Florida.

Service is a theme that extends beyond Briggs’ professional and military career and includes his free time. He is the volunteer captain of the Reedville Fishermen’s Museum’s historic Chesapeake Bay skipjack Claud W. Somers.

“It’s a Coast Guard-inspected vessel. During the summers, we take people out for pleasure cruises,” Briggs said. “When I’m at the helm, you realize you’re responsible for all these people but at the same time you’re getting to sail a boat built in 1911. It’s the coolest thing in the world.”