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Biographical Information on the Committee on Incorporating 21st Century Science into Risk-Based Evaluations
Jonathan M. Samet (Chair) is a pulmonary physician and epidemiologist. He is Distinguished Professor and Flora L. Thornton Chair for the Department of Preventive Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California (USC) and director of the USC Institute for Global Health. Dr. Samet’s research has focused on the health risks posed by inhaled pollutants. He has served on numerous committees concerned with public health: the US Environmental Protection Agency Science Advisory Board; committees of the National Research Council, including chairing the Committee on Health Risks of Exposure to Radon (BEIR VI), the Committee on Research Priorities for Airborne Particulate Matter, the Committee to Review EPA’s Draft IRIS Assessment of Formaldehyde, the Committee to Review the IRIS Process, and the Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology; and committees of the Institute of Medicine. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. Dr. Samet received his MD from the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry.
Melvin E. Andersen is Distinguished Research Fellow at ScitoVation. His research career has focused on developing biologically based dose–response models and applying them to human-health risk assessments for many environmental chemicals. Before joining ScitoVation in 2016, he held positions at the Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences, the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology, Colorado State University, the US Environmental Protection Agency, and the US Department of Defense with both the Navy and the Air Force. He has served on several National Research Council Committees, including the Committee on Toxicity Testing and Assessment of Environmental Agents. Dr. Andersen is a fellow of the Academy of Toxicological Sciences and a diplomate of both the American Board of Toxicology and the American Board of Industrial Hygiene. He earned a PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology from Cornell University.
Jon A. Arnot is the president of ARC Arnot Research & Consulting and an adjunct professor in the Department of Physical and Environmental Science and in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology of the University of Toronto. He has 15 years of research experience in the development, application, and evaluation of methods and models to assess the exposure, hazard, and risk posed by organic chemicals. His research has focused on the application of high-throughput screening methods for prioritizing chemicals for risk assessment. He is the principal investigator or co-investigator on various international projects, including collaborations in the United States, Europe, and Canada. He was the recipient of the James M. McKim III Innovative Student Research Award (2008) from the International QSAR Foundation to Reduce Animal Testing and the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) Best Student Paper Award (2009). Dr. Arnot earned his PhD in environmental and life sciences from Trent University.
Esteban Burchard is professor of medicine and bio-pharmaceutical sciences at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). His research interests center on identifying genetic, social, and environmental risk factors for asthma in ethnically diverse populations. Dr. Burchard has created the largest gene–environment study of asthma in minority-group children in the United States. He directs the UCSF Center for Genes, Environment & Health. Dr. Burchard received his MD from the Stanford University School of Medicine and his clinical training at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and UCSF. He also completed epidemiology training at the Harvard and University of California, Berkley, School of Public Health.
George P. Daston is the Victor Mills Society Research Fellow at the Procter & Gamble Company. He has published more than 100 articles and book chapters and edited 5 books in toxicology and risk assessment. His current re-
search efforts are in toxicogenomics and mechanistic toxicology, particularly in addressing how findings in these fields can improve risk assessment of chemicals and the development of nonanimal alternatives. Dr. Daston has served as president of the Teratology Society, as councilor and treasurer-elect of the Society of Toxicology, and on the US Environmental Protection Agency Science Advisory Board, the Board on Scientific Counselors of the National Toxicology Program, the National Research Council’s Board of Environmental Studies and Toxicology, and the National Children’s Study Advisory Committee. He is editor-in-chief of Birth Defects Research: Developmental and Reproductive Toxicology. With scientists at the US Humane Society, Dr. Daston manages the AltTox website, which is devoted to the exchange of scientific information leading to the development of in vitro replacements for toxicity assessments. Dr. Daston has been awarded the Teratology Society’s Josef Warkany Lectureship and Distinguished Service Award, the Toxicology Forum’s George H. Scott Award, and the Society of Toxicology’s Best Paper of the Year Award, and he is an elected fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is an adjunct professor of pediatrics of the University of Cincinnati. Dr. Daston earned his PhD in developmental biology from the University of Miami.
David B. Dunson is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor in the Department of Statistical Science of Duke University. His research interests include Bayesian statistics, complex hierarchical and latent variable modeling, and nonparametric statistical modeling. His methodological research focuses on nonparametric Bayes, latent variable methods, big data, scalable Bayesian inferences, functional and object data, and dimensionality reduction. He is a member of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the American Statistical Association, and the International Biometrics Society. Dr. Dunson received his PhD in biostatistics from Emory University.
Nigel Greene is the director of predictive compound ADME and safety at AstraZeneca and specializes in the application of computational and in vitro approaches to assess compound liabilities. His specific duties include establishing and managing a group of PhD scientists that profile chemicals for off-target pharmacology. His group uses computational modeling and analysis of chemical properties and in vitro assay profiles to help to predict the safety profile of chemicals in early discovery programs and to aid in chemical series and compound selection before in vivo studies are conducted. Dr. Greene’s other activities include mining internal and public databases of gene-expression data to explore biological mechanisms of toxicity and developing new in vitro assays for safety profiling on the basis of findings from the mining exercises. He recently served as a member of the National Research Council Committee on the Design and Evaluation of Safer Chemical Substitutions. Dr. Greene received his PhD in organometallic chemistry from the University of Leeds.
Heather B. Patisaul is an associate professor in the Department of Biology of North Carolina State University. Her research examines the steroid-dependent mechanisms through which sexually dimorphic behaviors and brain circuits arise. She also explores the mechanisms by which sexually dimorphic systems and behaviors can be disrupted by environmental estrogens. Her laboratory is interested in the mechanisms by which exposure to environmental estrogens can advance puberty and impair fertility in females. Dr. Patisaul served on the World Health Organization expert panel that assessed the risks associated with bisphenol A in 2010 and recently served on the National Research Council Committee to Review EPA’s Draft, State of the Science Paper on Nonmonotonic Dose Response. She received her PhD in population biology, ecology, and evolution from Emory University.
Kristi Pullen Fedinick is a staff scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Health and Environment Program. Her multidisciplinary training spans nearly 20 years and includes work in molecular biology, biochemistry, structural biology, computational biology, and population health. Dr. Pullen Fedinick’s work at NRDC has focused on the application of high-throughput technologies in predictive toxicology and chemical risk assessment. Before joining NRDC, she worked at a small environmental nonprofit in Chicago where she focused on air and drinking-water quality, science communication, and environmental-justice projects. Dr. Pullen Fedinick received a PhD in molecular and cell biology from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Beate R. Ritz is a professor in the Department of Epidemiology of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Fielding School of Public Health. Her research focuses on the health effects of occupational and environmental toxicants, such as pesticides, ionizing radiation, and air pollution; on chronic diseases, including neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders, and cancers; on adverse birth outcomes; and on asthma. In her research, she uses geographic information system (GIS) modeling of environmental exposures, including pesticide use and traffic-related air pollution in California, and investigates links between genetic susceptibility factors and environmental exposures in populations. Dr. Ritz is a member of the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health and the Southern California Environmental Health Science Center and co-directed the UCLA Center
for Gene-Environment Studies of Parkinson’s disease, funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. She received her MD and a PhD in medical sociology from the University of Hamburg, Germany, and an MPH and a PhD in epidemiology from UCLA.
Ivan Rusyn is a professor in the Department of Veterinary Integrative Biosciences of the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences of Texas A&M University. Before joining the university, he was a professor of environmental sciences and engineering at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Rusyn’s laboratory has an active research portfolio with a focus on the mechanisms of action of environmental toxicants, the genetic determinants of susceptibility to toxicant-induced injury, and computational toxicology. His studies on health effects of environmental agents have resulted in more than 150 peer-reviewed publications. He has served on several National Research Council committees and was a member of the Standing Committee on Use of Emerging Science for Environmental Health Decisions and the Committee on Toxicology. Dr. Rusyn received his MD from Ukrainian State Medical University in Kiev and his PhD in toxicology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Robert L. Tanguay is Distinguished Professor of Molecular Toxicology in the Department of Environmental and Molecular Toxicology of Oregon State University. His research interests include exploiting the advantages of the zebra fish (Danio rerio) model to improve human and environmental health; evaluating biological interactions and responses to environmental chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and nanoparticles by using rapid-throughput approaches; and understanding the mechanisms underlying the toxicity of chemicals, such as 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), ethanol, pharmaceuticals, and pesticides. Dr. Tanguay directs the Oregon State’s Superfund Research Program as the project leader for an investigation into PAH-induced developmental toxicity, as a co-investigator in work involving biological response indicator devices, and as a research coordinator in the program. He received his PhD in biochemistry from the University of California, Riverside.
Justin G. Teeguarden is a staff scientist and chief exposure scientist in the Environmental and Biological Sciences Directorate of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). He holds a joint faculty position with the Oregon State University (OSU) Department of Environmental and Molecular Toxicology, where he serves as the director of the OSU–PNNL–Superfund Center Research Translation Core. Dr. Teeguarden’s research focuses on computational and experimental exposure assessment in humans, animals, and cell-culture systems. Over the last decade, his research teams have focused on using emerging technologies, novel experimental data, and computational methods for solving public-health challenges related to human exposure to chemicals. He is the director of the PNNL Exposure Surveillance and Health Optimization Consortium in which he leads efforts to develop nontargeted analytical methods for characterizing the exposome. Dr. Teeguarden has received several awards from the Society of Toxicology for his work in computational and experimental exposure science as they are related to translating exposures across cell-culture, human, and animal test systems. He has served as the president of the Dose–Response Specialty Section of the Society for Risk Analysis and as president of the Nanotoxicology Specialty Section of the Society of Toxicology. Dr. Teeguarden served on the National Research Council Committee on Human and Environmental Exposure Science in the 21st Century. He received his PhD in toxicology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
James M. Tiedje is the University Distinguished Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics and of Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences and is director of the Center for Microbial Ecology of Michigan State University. His research focuses on ecology, physiology, and genetics underlying important microbial processes in nature, including biodegradation of pollutants. He has made notable contributions to the use of genomics and metagenomics to understand ecological functions, speciation, and niche adaptation. He has served as editor-in-chief of Applied and Environmental Microbiology and as editor of Microbial and Molecular Biology Reviews. He has more than 500 refereed papers, including seven in Science and Nature. He shared the 1992 Finley Prize of UNESCO for research contributions of international significance in microbiology; is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, of the American Academy of Microbiology, and of the Soil Science Society of America; and is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He was president of the American Society for Microbiology in 2004–2005. He received his PhD from Cornell University.
Paolo Vineis is professor and chair of environmental epidemiology at Imperial College London, School of Public Health. He is a leading researcher in the field of molecular epidemiology and his latest research focuses on examining biomarkers of disease risk, complex exposures, and intermediate biomarkers by using omic platforms in large epidemiological studies. He also studies the effects of climate change on noncommunicable diseases. Dr. Vineis is coordinating the European Commission–funded Exposomics Project and is a principal investigator or co-investigator on numerous international projects. He has
more than 700 publications, including papers in Nature, Nature Genetics, Lancet, and Lancet Oncology. He is a member of various international scientific and ethics committees and vice-chair of the Ethics Committee of the International Agency for Research on Cancer. Dr. Vineis received his MD from the University of Torino, Italy.
Michelle Williams is dean of the faculty and professor of epidemiology of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her research interests lie principally in reproductive and perinatal epidemiology, in which she focuses on integrating epidemiological, biological, and molecular approaches into rigorously designed clinical epidemiology research projects. Her overarching goal is to use biological and molecular biomarkers as objective measures of exposure and as validated preclinical proximal determinants (such as oxidative stress, systemic inflammation, and endothelial dysfunction) of discrete outcomes of clinical, public, and global health importance. She is the principal investigator on three large projects funded by the National Institutes of Health and previously served on the National Research Council Committee on Evaluation of Children’s Health: Measures of Risks, Protective and Promotional Factors for Assessing Child Health in the Community. Dr. Williams received her ScD in epidemiology from Harvard University.
Fred Wright is professor of statistics and biological sciences and director of the Bioinformatics Research Center of North Carolina State University. He is an internationally known statistical geneticist who has wide-ranging research interests, including genomics, bioinformatics, toxicogenomics, and the statistical principles underlying high-dimensional data analysis. Dr. Wright has been principal investigator on numerous grants with activities ranging from development of new methods of gene mapping to expression-quantitative trait mapping for multiple tissues. He was principal investigator of a US Environmental Protection Agency–funded STAR Center to apply genomics principles to long-standing problems in toxicology. He is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association and of the Delta Omega Honor Society for Public Health. Dr. Wright received his PhD in statistics from the University of Chicago.
Lauren Zeise is director of the California Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. She oversees the department’s activities, which include the development of risk assessments, hazard evaluations, toxicity reviews, cumulative impact analyses, frameworks and methods for assessing toxicity and cumulative effects of vulnerability and environmental exposures on communities, and the department’s activities in the California Environmental Contaminant Biomonitoring Program. Dr. Zeise was the 2008 recipient of the Society for Risk Analysis’ Outstanding Practitioners Award. She has served on advisory boards and committees of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Office of Technology Assessment, the World Health Organization, and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Dr. Zeise has served on numerous National Research Council and Institute of Medicine committees, including the Committee on Toxicity Testing and Assessment of Environmental Agents and the Committee on Improving Risk Analysis Approaches Used by EPA. Dr. Zeise received a PhD from Harvard University.
