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Suggested Citation:"Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2003. Exposure of the American Population to Radioactive Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Tests: A Review of the CDC-NCI Draft Report on a Feasibility Study of the Health Consequences to the American Population from Nuclear Weapons Tests Conducted by the United States and Other Nations. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10621.
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Committee Biographies

WILLIAM J.SCHULL, PhD (Chair), is Ashbel Smith Professor Emeritus at the School of Public Health, University of Texas, Houston. His specialty is human genetics, and his primary research interest is radiation biology. In addition to a distinguished academic career, Dr. Schull previously served as the head of the Department of Genetics with the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) in Japan and later went on to become one of the directors of ABCC’s successor organization, the Radiation Effects Research Foundation. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including Japan’s Order of the Sacred Treasure, Third Class. Dr. Schull is a member of several professional societies, including the American Epidemiological Society, the American Society of Human Genetics, the Radiation Research Society, and the Society for the Study of Human Biology.

BRUCE B.BOECKER, PhD, is a former assistant director of the Inhalation Toxicology Research Institute, Lovelace Biomedical and Environmental Research Institute, in Albuquerque, NM. He is currently a scientist emeritus of the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute. Dr. Boecker earned his PhD in radiation biology from the University of Rochester and has conducted research at Lovelace since that time. He has been particularly interested in the conduct of laboratory experimentation to develop information that may be used to predict the consequences of accidental exposures of humans or to establish standards that ensure the safe and orderly conduct of activities that may result in release of toxic agents to the environment. His personal research efforts have been associated primarily with the toxicology of airborne material associated with activities in the nuclear fuel cycle. This research has spanned from studies of aerosol characteristics as they may influence patterns of deposition, retention, and dosimetry and risk assessments of different nuclear-energy systems. Dr. Boecker is also a certified health physicist and an emeritus member of the Radiation Research Society, Health Physics Society, and American Academy of Health Physics and an honorary member of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements. He has received a Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award from the Health Physics Society.

A.BERTRAND BRILL, MD, PhD, is a research professor in the Departments of Radiology and Physics at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Brill earned his MD from the University of Utah and his PhD in biophysics from the University of California, Berkeley. He served in the US Public Health Service (PHS) in Japan at the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) in the Statistics and Medicine Departments (1957–1959) and as the PHS representative to ABCC until 1964. Dr. Brill’s specialty is nuclear medicine, and his major research includes radiation leukemogenesis, effects of radiation on thyroid function, and effects of diagnostic radioisotope studies, particularly exposures from 131I. Dr. Brill is a member of the National Cancer Institute task group studying effects of the Chernobyl accident on thyroid-cancer induction in children. He is a former medical director in the Division of Radiological Health, US Public Health Service, and a former professor of radiology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is a member of the Society of Nuclear Medicine Radiation Effects Committee, which he chaired for 10 years; the Medical Internal Radiation Dose Committee; and the American Thyroid Association.

Suggested Citation:"Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2003. Exposure of the American Population to Radioactive Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Tests: A Review of the CDC-NCI Draft Report on a Feasibility Study of the Health Consequences to the American Population from Nuclear Weapons Tests Conducted by the United States and Other Nations. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10621.
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MELVIN W.CARTER, PhD, is currently an international radiation-protection consultant and Neely Professor Emeritus at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA. His fields of interests include: pollutant pathways in the environment and their kinetics; policy formulation in environmental protection and radiological protection; and procedures and methods for environmental surveillance. His other fields of interest are: the management of radioactive wastes; radiological engineering evaluations for criteria and standards; and the transportation of radioactive materials. He served as the Director of the Office of Interdisciplinary Programs at Georgia Tech, which included the Bioengineering Center and Environmental Resources Center. He was the Director of the National Environment Research Center of the EPA, and the Southeastern Radiological Health Laboratory of the US Public Health Service. He performed research on radioactive water decontamination and waste disposal, and participated in investigative work on the accumulation of radioactivity in bottom sediments of the Clinch and Tennessee Rivers. Dr. Carter is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), past President of the Health Physics Society, and past President of the International Radiological Protection Association. He served as chairman and member of a number of scientific committees, and has been a member of the Board of Directors of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements. He was inducted into Georgia Tech’s Engineering Hall of Fame. Dr. Carter has over 100 publications including several books. He served as a presidential appointee as one of the nine-member Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board. He holds a BS degree in Civil Engineering, as well as an MS degree in Public Health Engineering from Georgia Tech, and a PhD degree in Radiological and Environmental Engineering with a minor in Chemistry from the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL.

SUE B.CLARK, PhD, is the Westinghouse Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. Her current research includes the environmental chemistry of plutonium and other actinides, chemistry of high-level radioactive-waste systems, and chemistry of actinide-bearing solid phases in natural environments. She holds a BS from Lander College and an MS and a PhD degree in chemistry from Florida State University. Before joining Washington State University in 1996, she was an assistant research ecologist at the University of Georgia’s Savannah River Ecology Laboratory (1992–1996) and senior scientist at Westinghouse Savannah River Company’s Savannah River Technology Center (1989–1992). She has served on two committees for the National Research Council’s Board on Radioactive Waste Management and served on the Committee on Dosimetry for the Radiation Effects Research Foundation. She has received several awards, including the Young Faculty Achievement Award in the College of Sciences at Washington State University (1998–1999), a Young Investigator Award, National Academy of Sciences Program on Nuclear Accidents and Radioactive Contamination (1993–1994), and the George Westinghouse Signature Award of Excellence, Westinghouse Corporation (1991). She is a member of the American Chemical Society and Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society.

EDMUND A.C.CROUCH, PhD, is a senior scientist at Cambridge Environmental, Inc. Dr. Crouch has published widely in environmental quality, risk assessment, and the presentation and analysis of uncertainties. He is a coauthor of a major text in risk assessment, Risk/Benefit Analysis. Dr. Crouch serves as an expert adviser to various local and national agencies concerned with public health and the environment and has served on three National Research Council committees. He has written computer programs for the sophisticated analysis of results from

Suggested Citation:"Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2003. Exposure of the American Population to Radioactive Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Tests: A Review of the CDC-NCI Draft Report on a Feasibility Study of the Health Consequences to the American Population from Nuclear Weapons Tests Conducted by the United States and Other Nations. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10621.
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carcinogenesis bioassays, has developed algorithms on the levels of both theory and computer implementation for the objective quantification of waste-site contamination, and has designed Monte Carlo simulations for purposes of fully characterizing uncertainties and variabilities inherent in health risk assessment.

SHARON M.FRIEDMAN, MA, is a professor and director of the Science and Environmental Writing Program at Lehigh University. She served as chair of the Department of Journalism and Communication at Lehigh from 1986–1995. Her research focuses on how scientific, environmental, technologic, and risk issues are communicated to the public. She served as a consultant to the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island and the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP). She is a coauthor of Reporting on the Environment: A Handbook for Journalists, which has been translated into 11 languages. Sponsored by ESCAP and other organizations, she has lectured in many Asian countries about risk communication and environmental journalism, and she has served as a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer in Brazil. Professor Friedman is the coeditor of Communicating Uncertainty: Media Coverage of New and Controversial Science and of Scientists and Journalists: Reporting Science as News. She is an associate editor of the journal Risk: Health, Safety and Environment and a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the journal Science Communication. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and a member of the Council of AAAS. She chairs the advisory committee for the US Department of Energy’s Low Dose Radiation Research Program.

KATHRYN A.HIGLEY, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering, Oregon State University. She holds a BA in chemistry (1978) from Reed College and an MS (1992) and a PhD (1994) in radiological health sciences from Colorado State University. Her fields of interest include human and ecologic risk assessment, environmental pathway analyses, environmental radiation monitoring, radionuclide and hazardous-chemical transport, radiochemistry, neutron activation analysis, nuclear-emergency response planning, and environmental regulations. She has held both reactor operator and senior reactor operator’s licenses, and she is a former reactor supervisor for the Reed College TRIGA reactor. She has held research positions at three research reactors: Reed College, Washington State University (Pullman), and Oregon State University. She has 3 years of experience in environmental-radiation monitoring at the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant in Oregon and 14 years with Battelle, Pacific Northwest Laboratories as an environmental health physicist at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. She is a consultant to the US Department of Energy’s Office of Environment, Policy and Assistance. She is a member of the Health Physics Society, the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, and BIOMOVs II (Biospheric Model Validation Study). She is a certified health physicist, and has been at Oregon State University since 1994.

SUSAN E.LEDERER, PhD, is a professor of history and medicine at Yale University School of Medicine, section of the History of Medicine. She received her doctorate in the history of science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. A historian of American medicine, she served as a member of the President’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. The author of Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation In America Before the Second World War, she has written extensively on issues related to human and animal experimentation and the development of bioethics.

Suggested Citation:"Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2003. Exposure of the American Population to Radioactive Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Tests: A Review of the CDC-NCI Draft Report on a Feasibility Study of the Health Consequences to the American Population from Nuclear Weapons Tests Conducted by the United States and Other Nations. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10621.
×

MILTON LEVENSON, BChE, is a retired vice president of Bechtel International, San Francisco. He earned his degree in chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota and during his professional career has been affiliated with Houdaille-Hershey Corporation, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, the Electric Power Research Institute, and the Bechtel Power Corporation. His research interests lie mainly in water-moderated-reactor technology, fuel-cycle technology, and breeder-reactor development. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1976. He was a member of the Committee on an Assessment of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Radiation Studies from DOE Contractor Sites: Subcommittee to Review the Savannah River Source-Term Report.

HERWIG G.PARETZKE, PhD, has more than 30 years of experience in radiation-protection research and is currently director of the Institute of Radiation Protection of the German National Research Center for Environmental and Health Research, Neuherberg, and professor of radiation physics, radiation biophysics and environmental physics at the Universities of Munich, Regensburg, and Innsbruck. Dr. Paretzke received his PhD in physics from the Technical University of Munich. He serves as an honorary professor for radiation biophysics in the Technical University of Munich, Physics Department. From 1973 to 1990, Dr. Paretzke served as a guest scientist at several European, North American and South American research centers. His main research interests are dynamic radioecology and environmental physics; radiation transport and radiation tracks in matter of electrons, photons, neutrons and ions; biophysical effects of ionizing radiation; and risk analysis for somatic late effects of low doses and low dose rates of ionizing radiation in humans. He is a member of the Radiation Research Society (USA); the German Physical Society, the German Health Physics Society, the German Society for Biophysics, and the International Union of Radioecology.

BOBBY R.SCOTT, PhD, is a biophysicist at Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute. Dr. Scott’s career has focused on dosimetry (microdosimetry and macrodosimetry) and risk characterization for stochastic and deterministic radiologic effects. Recently, his research interest has broadened to include molecular dosimetry and risk characterization for stochastic effects of genotoxic chemicals. He has applied his risk-modeling skills to exposure and dose-response data generated in laboratory studies, to data derived from worker exposures, and to data derived from patients receiving therapy for specific diseases (such as cancer). His dose-reconstruction research has included using clinical data on Russians exposed by inhalation to plutonium-239 with known (estimated) intake to develop biologic dosimetry for other workers with unknown intakes. His epidemiologic research has addressed cancer induction in Russian workers chronically exposed to low-LET gamma and high-LET alpha radiation. He has also developed models for evaluating risks of deterministic effects of exposure to large radiation doses that account for uncertainty and variability. Recently, he has been involved in research on using Bayesian inference methods to integrate dosimetric (dose and dose-rate), molecular (DNA-damage induction, repair, and misrepair), and cellular (apoptosis, necrotic cell death, and neoplastic transformation) phenomena in evaluating stochastic effects of exposure of mammalian cells to genotoxic agents. He is a member of the Radiation Research Society and the Health Physics Society.

ROY E.SHORE, PhD, DrPH, is a professor of environmental medicine and director of the Epidemiology Program at New York University School OF mEDICINE. Dr. Shore received his PhD from Syracuse University in 1967 and his DrPH from Columbia University in 1982. His

Suggested Citation:"Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2003. Exposure of the American Population to Radioactive Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Tests: A Review of the CDC-NCI Draft Report on a Feasibility Study of the Health Consequences to the American Population from Nuclear Weapons Tests Conducted by the United States and Other Nations. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10621.
×

research interests include radiation, environmental, and molecular epidemiology. He has served on the standing committees on radiation biology and risk assessment of the International Commission on Radiological Protection and the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements. He has served on several scientific advisory groups for the National Cancer Institute, US Department of Energy, and the US Environmental Protection Agency and on editorial boards of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Radiation Research, and Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention.

DANIEL O.STRAM, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine at the University of Southern California. Dr. Stram earned his PhD in statistics from Temple University and engaged in postdoctoral research in biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health. In 1986–1989, he was a member of the Statistics Department of the Radiation Effects Research Foundation in Hiroshima. Since 1990, Dr. Stram has been a major participant in clinical research and epidemiology in childhood and adult cancers at the University of Southern California and the Children’s Cancer Group. He has special interest in the measurement error characteristics of radiation-dosimetry systems and other exposure-assessment methods when they are applied to epidemiologic research.

Suggested Citation:"Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2003. Exposure of the American Population to Radioactive Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Tests: A Review of the CDC-NCI Draft Report on a Feasibility Study of the Health Consequences to the American Population from Nuclear Weapons Tests Conducted by the United States and Other Nations. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10621.
×
Page 65
Suggested Citation:"Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2003. Exposure of the American Population to Radioactive Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Tests: A Review of the CDC-NCI Draft Report on a Feasibility Study of the Health Consequences to the American Population from Nuclear Weapons Tests Conducted by the United States and Other Nations. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10621.
×
Page 66
Suggested Citation:"Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2003. Exposure of the American Population to Radioactive Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Tests: A Review of the CDC-NCI Draft Report on a Feasibility Study of the Health Consequences to the American Population from Nuclear Weapons Tests Conducted by the United States and Other Nations. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10621.
×
Page 67
Suggested Citation:"Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2003. Exposure of the American Population to Radioactive Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Tests: A Review of the CDC-NCI Draft Report on a Feasibility Study of the Health Consequences to the American Population from Nuclear Weapons Tests Conducted by the United States and Other Nations. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10621.
×
Page 68
Suggested Citation:"Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2003. Exposure of the American Population to Radioactive Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Tests: A Review of the CDC-NCI Draft Report on a Feasibility Study of the Health Consequences to the American Population from Nuclear Weapons Tests Conducted by the United States and Other Nations. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10621.
×
Page 69
Exposure of the American Population to Radioactive Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Tests: A Review of the CDC-NCI Draft Report on a Feasibility Study of the Health Consequences to the American Population from Nuclear Weapons Tests Conducted by the United States and Other Nations Get This Book
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This report is a review of the draft feasibility study that was issued at the request of Congress by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Over 500 atmospheric nuclear-weapons tests were conducted at various sites around the world during 1945-1980. As public awareness and concern mounted over the possible health hazards associated with exposure to the fallout from weapons testing, a feasibility study was initiated by CDC and NCI to assess the extent of the hazard. The CDC-NCI study claims that the fallout might have led to approximately 11,000 excess deaths, most caused by thyroid cancer linked to exposure to iodine-131. The committee noted that CDC and NCI used the best available data to estimate exposure and health hazards. The committee does not recommend an expanded study of exposure to radionuclides other than 131I since radiation doses from those radionuclides were much lower than those from 131I. It also recommended that CDC urge Congress to prohibit the destruction of all remaining records relevant to fallout.

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