Source: RISK newsletter,
Fourth Quarter 1995, published by the Society for Risk Analysis
In keeping with the meeting theme, "Learning from Cross-Cultural Comparison," the opening plenary session of the joint annual meeting of the Society for Risk Analysis and the Japan Section of SRA will feature addresses by Society members from opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean--Dr. Eiji Yokoyama of Japan and Professor M. Granger Morgan of the United States.
Dr. Yokoyama is the recently retired director general of Japan's National Institute of Public Health and is currently president of the Japan Society for Atmospheric Environment. He has been a member of SRA since 1986 and was president of the Japan Section from 1990 to 1992. The topic of his plenary address will be "Health Risk Assessment in Japan."
Dr. Yokoyama graduated from the University of Tokyo School of Medicine in 1954, continuing his association with the university's hospital for five years as a respiratory clinician. He then joined the research staff of the National Institute of Public Health, becoming the institute's director general in 1993.
During his years at the institute, Dr. Yokoyama focused on the evaluation of health effects caused by air pollution, especially the physiological effects of nitrogen dioxide and photochemical oxidants. He also performed similar research in the United States--first as a research fellow at the Department of Physiology in the School of Public Health at Harvard University (1963-1965) and later as a visiting scientist at the Department of Environmental Health of the School of Public Health and Community Medicine at the University of Washington (1970-1971). For his numerous research contributions, he was presented the Award of the Japan Society of Air Pollution in 1986.
Dr. Yokoyama has also been active in ensuring practical applications of research results, both his and others, within Japan. He was a member of the expert committee that established Japan's National Ambient Air Quality Standards for nitrogen dioxide and photochemical oxidants in 1973, helping to revise the former in 1978. He also helped revise Japan's Pollution-related Health Damage Compensation Law in 1988 and served as an appointed member of Japan's Central Council for Environmental Pollution Control from 1982 to 1989. In addition, he participated in two workshops (in 1992 and 1993) on Risk Assessment and Management of Toxic Chemicals that were sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Japan National Institute for Environmental Studies. More recently, in 1994-1995, he chaired a special committee organized by the Environmental Agency, Japan, for reviewing the countermeasures in the risk-based approach for controlling hazardous air pollutants.
The second plenary speaker, M. Granger Morgan of Carnegie
Mellon University, will speak on "Risk Analysis: A Personal
Assessment of the State of the Field." He will review the
progress the field has made over the past two decades, offer his
personal assessment of how professionals in the field have done,
and discuss some of the issues that he believes need attention in
the future. He is the recipient of SRA's 1995
Distinguished Achievement Award.