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Biographic Information on the Committee to Develop a Scoping Plan to Assess the Hazards of Organohalogen Flame Retardants
David C. Dorman (Chair) is a professor of toxicology in the Department of Molecular Biosciences of North Carolina State University. The primary objective of his research is to provide a refined understanding of chemically induced neurotoxicity in laboratory animals that will lead to improved assessment of potential neurotoxicity in humans. Dr. Dorman’s research interests include neurotoxicology, nasal toxicology, pharmacokinetics, and cognition and olfaction in military working dogs. He has served as a member or chair of several National Academies committees, including the Committees on Emergency and Continuous Exposure Guidance Levels for Selected Submarine Contaminants, the Committee to Evaluate Potential Health Risks from Recurrent Lead Exposure to DOD Firing Range Personnel, the Committee to Review EPA’s Draft IRIS Assessment of Formaldehyde, the Committee to Review the IRIS Process, and the Committee on Endocrine-Related Low-Dose Toxicity. He received his DVM from Colorado State University. He completed a combined PhD and residency program in toxicology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is a diplomate of the American Board of Veterinary Toxicology and the American Board of Toxicology.
Hugh A. Barton (retired) was an associate research fellow with Pfizer, Inc. He specializes in the use of physiologically based pharmacokinetic and mechanistic pharmacodynamic modeling to address low-dose, interspecies, and inter-route extrapolations in estimating risks. Dr. Barton is a past president of the Biological Modeling Specialty Section and the Risk Assessment Specialty Section of the Society of Toxicology. He was a member of the National Academies Committee on Inorganic Arsenic. Dr. Barton received his PhD in toxicology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Karen Blackburn is a Victor Mills Society Research Fellow at Procter and Gamble Co. Her primary expertise is risk assessment to support safe human exposures to environmental contaminants and consumer products with an emphasis on development of novel approaches. Before working at Procter and Gamble, Dr. Blackburn was a toxicologist at the US Environmental Protection Agency. She received a PhD in physiology and biophysics from the University of Cincinnati.
John Bucher is a senior scientist in the National Toxicology Program (NTP) at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). He has held multiple leadership positions within NIEHS and most recently retired as the NTP associate director. His specific research interests include characterization of the toxic and carcinogenic potential of various chemicals, mixtures, and physical agents and issues related to improving research and analysis tools and assays for those purposes. Additional activities include guidance in the development of systematic review procedures and their application in the environmental health sciences. Dr. Bucher is a fellow of the Collegium Ramazzini and a recipient of the Doerenkamp-Zbinden Foundation Award for Animal Protection in Science and numerous NIH awards. He recieved a PhD in pharmacology from the University of Iowa and is a diplomate of the American Board of Toxicology.
Julie L. Daniels is a professor in the departments of epidemiology and maternal and child health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on prenatal environmental and nutritional exposures that might affect children’s growth, neurodevelopment, and overall health. She has created a platform for studying early life exposure to brominated and organophosphate flame retardants, persistent organic pollutants, and long-chain fatty acids in relation to children’s health in the Pregnancy, Infection, and Nutrition Study. Dr. Daniels is an associate editor of Environmental Health Perspectives and a member of the Autism Research Program Panel of the Department of Defense and US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command. She received her PhD in epidemiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Jennifer L. Freeman is an associate professor in the School of Health Sciences of Purdue University. Her research interests are the underlying genetic and epigenetic mechanisms of toxicity of environmental stressors with a focus on pesticides, metals, radiation, and emerging contaminants. Her studies are investigating the developmental origin of health and disease pathogenesis with a specific focus on neurologic disorders, reproductive dysfunction, cardiovascular function, and cancer. She received a PhD in environmental toxicology and molecular cytogenetics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Kamel Mansouri is lead computational chemist at Integrated Laboratory Systems. Previously, he was an investigator at ScitoVation. In 2013, he joined the National Center for Computational Toxicology at the US Environmental Protection Agency as an ORISE postdoctoral fellow. He has worked on several projects involving quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) modeling, cheminformatics, and data-mining and has collaborated and led projects in the QSAR field. Dr. Mansouri obtained an engineering degree in analytic chemistry from the University of Tunis, Tunisia, an MS in cheminformatics from the University of Strasbourg, France, and a PhD in computational chemistry from the University of Milano Bicocca, Italy.
Carmen Messerlian is a research scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her research focuses on the effects of environmental chemicals on fertility, pregnancy, and human development. She is working on the Environment and Reproductive Health Study, which involves a prospective preconception cohort established to evaluate environmental and dietary determinants of fertility in couples attending the Massachusetts General Hospital Fertility Center in Boston. She is investigating the effects of phthalates and other emerging chemicals and their mixtures on ovarian reserve, time to pregnancy, pregnancy loss, preterm birth, birthweight, and child development. Her goal is to understand how exposure to environmental chemicals in the preconception and prenatal periods influences a couple’s ability to achieve conception, maintain pregnancy, and deliver healthy offspring. Before her research career, she worked on maternal and child public-health strategies for municipal, provincial, and global health programs. Dr. Messerlian received her PhD in epidemiology from McGill University.
David M. Reif is an associate professor of biological sciences at North Carolina State University and a resident member of the Bioinformatics Research Center. His research focuses on the complex interactions between human health and the environment through the integrated analysis of high-dimensional data from diverse sources, including epidemiologic studies, high-throughput screening of environmental chemicals, and model organism data. Dr. Reif was previously a principal investigator with the US Environmental Protection Agency’s National Center for Computational Toxicology, where he led several statistical and bioinformatic efforts with federal, academic, and industry partners. He served on the National Academies Committee on Predictive-Toxicology Approaches for Military Assessments of Acute Exposures. Dr. Reif received his PhD in human genetics and MS in statistics from Vanderbilt University and his BS in biology from the College of William and Mary, where he was a Monroe Scholar.
Gina M. Solomon is a principal investigator at the Public Health Institute in Oakland, California, and a clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She served as the deputy secretary for science and health at the California Environmental Protection Agency from 2012 to 2017. Dr. Solomon’s work has spanned a wide array of fields, including children’s environmental health, reproductive toxicity, cumulative effects, and the use of novel data streams to screen chemicals for toxicity. Her work has also focused on exposure science in relation to air pollutants, pesticides, mold, and metals in soil, and on the health effects of climate change. She was involved in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Gulf oil spill, and the Chevron Richmond explosion and fire, and she successfully spearheaded regulations to improve refinery safety in California. Dr. Solomon has served on multiple boards and committees of the National Academies, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Science Advisory Board, and the National Toxicology Program Board of Scientific Counselors. She also serves on the EPA Board of Scientific Counselors Chemical Safety for Sustainability subcommittee. Dr. Solomon received her MD from Yale and completed her MPH and her residency and fellowship training in internal medicine and occupational and environmental medicine at Harvard.
Chihae Yang is the chief scientific officer of Altamira LLC and managing director and CEO of Molecular Networks GMbH. She is also a visiting professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Ohio State University. Her research interests are in molecular informatics, computational modeling and simulation, and development of chemoinformatics software. Dr. Yang was an ORISE fellow at the US Food and Drug Administration, where she was involved in the design and implementation of the Chemical Risk Estimation and Evaluation System. She is a former board member of the American Society of Cellular and Computational Toxicology. She received her PhD in chemistry from Ohio State University.