Appendix C
Biographical Sketches of Committee and Staff
Jonathan M. Samet, M.D., a pulmonary physician and epidemiologist, is currently professor and Flora L. Thornton Chair for the Department of Preventive Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California and director of the University of Southern California Institute for Global Health. He received an A.B. degree in chemistry and physics from Harvard College, before receiving the M.D. from the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. He also has an M.S. in epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Samet has investigated diverse health issues using epidemiological approaches. His research has focused on the health risks of inhaled pollutants—particles and ozone in outdoor air and indoor pollutants including secondhand smoke and radon. He has also investigated the occurrence and causes of cancer and respiratory diseases, emphasizing the risks of active and passive smoking. He has served on numerous committees concerned with using scientific evidence for the development of policy to protect public health. He was a member of the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR) IV committee and chair of BEIR VI. For several decades, he has been involved in global health focused on tobacco control and air pollution. He currently chairs the Food and Drug Administration’s Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee. He was appointed to the National Cancer Advisory Board in 2011. Dr. Samet received the Surgeon General’s Medallion in 1990 and 2006, the 2004 Prince Mahidol Award for Global Health awarded by the King of Thailand, and the 2006 Public Service Award of the American Thoracic Society. He was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies in 1997.
Harold L. Beck is an expert in radiation dose reconstruction. A physicist for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)/Atomic Energy Commission for over 36 years, he retired in 1999 as the director of the Environmental Science Division of the DOE Environmental Measurements Laboratory (EML) in New York City and is presently a private consultant conducting various dose reconstructions in cooperation with scientists at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and Vanderbilt University. During his tenure at EML, he also served as director of the EML Instrumentation Division and as acting deputy director of the laboratory. Mr. Beck has authored well over 100 publications on radiation physics, radiation measurement, dose reconstruction, environmental radiation, and radiation dosimetry. His efforts in the development of the scientific approach to reconstructing fallout doses to the U.S. population from aboveground nuclear weapons testing in Nevada earned him the DOE Meritorious Service award in 1988, the second-highest award in the department. Mr. Beck served as scientific vice president for radiation measurements and dosimetry of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP) from 1996 to 2003, and in 2004 was elected to distinguished emeritus membership in NCRP. From 2004 to 2006, he served as
a member of the National Research Council’s Board on Radiation Effects Research/Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board. He currently serves as a member of the Veterans (federal advisory) Board on Dose Reconstruction and the U.S. Scientific Review Group, Department of Energy Russian Health Studies Program. He has served as an expert member or chair on a number of NCRP and National Research Council scientific studies related to radiation dosimetry. He served as a member of the National Research Council’s Committee on Analysis of Cancer Risks in Populations near Nuclear Facilities: Phase 1.
Steven M. Becker, Ph.D., is professor of community and environmental health in the College of Health Sciences at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. He is an internationally recognized expert on the public health, risk communication, and preparedness and response issues associated with large-scale emergencies and disasters. Dr. Becker has nearly two decades of field experience at the sites of major incidents around the world, including the 1999 nuclear criticality accident in Tokaimura, Japan, and the 2001 foot-and-mouth disease outbreak in the United Kingdom. Most recently, he was a member of a special three-person radiological emergency assistance team that was invited to Japan in response to the March 2011 earthquake-tsunami disaster and the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. While on the ground, the team exchanged information with Japanese counterparts and provided training to more than 1,100 hospital and healthcare professionals and emergency responders. In 2005, Dr. Becker was elected to the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, where he currently serves on PAC 3 (Nuclear and Radiological Security and Safety) and PAC 7 (Radiation Education, Risk Communication, Outreach, and Policy). In 2010, he was named a G. William Morgan Lecturer by the Health Physics Society of the United States, and early in 2012 he was named to the National Thought Leader Advisory Council of the National Public Health Information Coalition. In September 2012, Dr. Becker was appointed by President Barack Obama to serve on the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board. Dr. Becker holds a B.A. from George Washington University, an M.A. from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College. He also was a Kreitman Scholar at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and a Visiting Fellow at the Japan Emergency Medicine Foundation and National Hospital Tokyo Disaster Medical Center.
Andre Bouville, Ph.D., was head of the Radiation Dosimetry Unit of the Radiation Epidemiology Branch of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) until his retirement at the end of 2010. He joined NCI in 1984, where, first as an expert and then as a senior radiation physicist, he has been involved in the estimation of radiation doses resulting from radioactive fallout from atmospheric nuclear weapons tests and from the Chernobyl accident. From 1972 to 1984, Dr. Bouville was employed in France by the French Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN) where he contributed to a number of environmental and dosimetric studies related to nuclear facilities. He obtained his Ph.D. in physics at the University Paul-Sabatier in Toulouse in 1970. Dr. Bouville was a member of Committee 2 (doses from radiation exposure) of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) from 1989 to 2009, is a Distinguished Emeritus Member of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP), and a Lifetime Associate of the National Academy of Sciences. He was scientific secretary of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) from 1970 to 1972 and remained associated with that committee as a consultant until 2000. He also served as a member of the National Research Council’s committee on Analysis of Cancer Risks in Populations near Nuclear Facilities: Phase 1.
Jean D. Brender, Ph.D., is a professor of epidemiology at the Texas A&M School of Public Health and served as associate dean for research during 2009-2014. Her main research interests include epidemiology of birth defects, prenatal environmental and occupational exposures and adverse reproductive outcomes, adverse health effects associated with residential proximity to industrial emissions and hazardous waste sites, and application of epidemiologic methods to clinical studies. She has 16 years of experience serving on institutional review boards—10 years on the Texas Department of Health board and 6 years on the Texas A&M University board. Dr. Brender has held consultancy positions with the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. She holds a Ph.D. in epidemiology from University of Washington and an M.N. and B.S.N in nursing from the University of Washington and Whitworth University respectively. She is a fellow of the American College of Epidemiology.
Christie R. Eheman, Ph.D., has been chief of the Cancer Surveillance Branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for 6 years where she oversees the funding as well as technical support and requirements for the National Program of Cancer Registries. Over the last 13 years as a cancer epidemiologist within the Division of Cancer Prevention and Control (DCPC), she has published studies related to breast, ovarian, uterine, and lung cancers. She is currently engaged in analyses of treatment patterns for colon and breast cancer. Prior to joining DCPC, Dr. Eheman focused on environmental exposures to radiation within the National Center for Environmental Health, CDC, where she was involved in assessing the risks associated with indoor radon, contaminated waste sites, and historic releases from Department of Energy sites. Since starting work at CDC in 1984, she has published on occupational exposures to indoor radon, on radon testing behaviors, and on the potential health consequences from nuclear reactor incidents. Dr. Eheman earned an M.S. in health physics from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in epidemiology from Emory University. She is currently the CDC representative to the Executive Committee of the American Joint Committee on Cancer; serves on the Immunization Information Systems’ Executive Board for the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, which provide advice on priorities for the immunization registry; and serves on multiple cancer registry work groups and steering committees.
R. William Field, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of Occupational and Environmental Health and in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Iowa’s College of Public Health. He is also a professor of toxicology and health informatics within the graduate college at the University of Iowa. In addition, he serves as director of the Occupational Epidemiology Training Program at Heartland Center for Occupational Health and Safety, funded by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. He also serves as director of the Pulmonary Outcomes Cluster at the University of Iowa Environmental Health Sciences Research Center, funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences . He is a member of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board and currently chair of the board’s Radiation Advisory Committee. He was appointed by President Obama in 2009 to the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health. Dr. Field has been active in numerous national and international collaborative radiation-related epidemiological projects and has served on several previous National Academy of Sciences committees. Dr. Field received his Ph.D. in preventive medicine from the College of Medicine at the University of Iowa. He is a fellow of the American College of Epidemiology.
Daniel O. Stram, Ph.D., is professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. He received his Ph.D. in statistics from Temple University in 1983 and served as a postdoctoral fellow in the Biostatistics Department of the Harvard School of Public Health from 1984 to 1986. From 1986 to 1989, he was a research associate at the Radiation Effects Research Foundation in Hiroshima, Japan. Dr. Stram’s main areas of research are in the statistical problems that arise in the design, analysis, and interpretation of epidemiological studies of cancer and other diseases. His work on radiation epidemiology studies includes helping to characterize the statistical nature of errors in dose estimates for the atomic bomb survivor study; developing a multilevel variance components model for the dosimetry used in the Colorado Plateau uranium miners cohort for the purpose of better understanding dose and dose rate effects in those data; and characterizing study power and sample size issues in epidemiologic studies in which a complex dosimetry system is used to estimate radiation dose. Besides the field of radiation epidemiology, his past and current research has focused on statistical issues relevant to clinical trials of treatment for pediatric cancer, nutritional epidemiology studies, and to studies of the genetics of complex diseases. He is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association and has authored or coauthored over 200 peer-reviewed articles. He also served as a member of the National Research Council’s committee on Analysis of Cancer Risks in Populations near Nuclear Facilities: Phase 1.
Margot Tirmarche, Ph.D., was appointed commissioner of the Nuclear Safety Authority of France in 2012. Prior to that she was director of scientific assessment at the Institute of Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN). She was the chief of the laboratory of epidemiology at IRSN for the period 1999-2008 and an epidemiologist in the same laboratory since 1980. She has a scientific background (Ph.D. equivalent) in biology and genetics, completed by specific diploma at the Medical University of Paris (Paris XI), related to epidemiology and oncology. During
the period 1975-1979, she worked at the Institute of Cancer in Villejuif in charge of the French coordination of a case-control study initiated by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), aiming toward a joint American-European analysis of lung cancer risk and tobacco consumption in different countries. She started in the radiation epidemiology field in 1980 and was in charge of the first cohort study in this field in France (uranium miners cohort). She conducted and coordinated several epidemiologic studies in relation to low chronic radiation exposure of various types: alpha exposure (radon decay exposure), external exposure (occupational cohorts), post-Chernobyl studies, and studies in the Urals. She also coordinated several multinational European contracts in the field of radiation epidemiology. She is a member of the French delegation at the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), contributing to recently published reports on radon and on Chernobyl effects. She is also a member of Committee 1 (radiation effects) of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP), where she is presently in charge of a working group that is analyzing cancer risk linked to alpha emitters (radon decay, uranium, plutonium). She is also an expert of the World Health Organization. Dr. Tirmarche also served as a member of the National Research Council’s Committee on Analysis of Cancer Risks in Populations near Nuclear Facilities: Phase 1.
Jonathan C. Wakefield, Ph.D., has been professor in the Departments of Statistics and Biostatistics in the University of Washington since 2002. He was chair of the Statistics Department from 2009 to 2011. Over the past 20 years, Dr. Wakefield’s main research focus has been on spatial epidemiology and in particular on methodological issues relating to ecologic studies. More recently he has been interested in the analysis of infectious disease data and on data arising from complex sampling designs. He has authored or coauthored around a 100 articles and published the book Bayesian and Frequentist Regression Methods. Dr. Wakefield received a Ph.D. in statistics from Nottingham University, UK. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and recipient of the Guy Medal in Bronze from the Royal Statistical Society.
STAFF
Ourania (Rania) Kosti, Ph.D., joined the staff of the Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board (NRSB) of the National Academy of Sciences in January 2011. Prior to her current appointment, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C., where she conducted research on biomarker development for early cancer detection using case-control epidemiologic study designs. She focused primarily on prostate, breast, and liver cancers and trying to identify those individuals who are at high risk of developing malignancies. Dr. Kosti also trained at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) (2005-2007). She received a B.Sc. in biochemistry from the University of Surrey, UK, an M.Sc. in molecular medicine from University College London, and a Ph.D in molecular endocrinology from St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, UK. Dr. Kosti’s interests within the NRSB focus on radiation health effects.
Jennifer (Jenny) Heimberg, Ph.D., has been at the National Academy of Sciences since 2011, working for NRSB. Within the NRSB, she has focused on nuclear security, nuclear detection capabilities, and environmental management issues. Dr. Heimberg has directed studies and workshops related to nuclear proliferation, nuclear terrorism, and the management of nuclear wastes. Prior to the NAS, she worked as a program manager at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) for nearly 10 years. While at APL she established and grew its nuclear security program with the Department of Homeland Security’s Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO). She received a B.S. in physics from Georgetown University, a B.S.E.E. from Catholic University, and a Ph.D. in physics from Northwestern University.
