RISK newsletter:
Fenner-Crisp and Jenkins-Smith Receive
SRA Awards

Penelope Fenner-Crisp, the deputy director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Pesticide Programs, is the first recipient of the Society for Risk Analysis' Outstanding Risk Practitioner Award in recognition of her excellent risk analysis work in the public sector.

As deputy director of the Office of Pesticide Programs, Fenner-Crisp shares with the director oversight of EPA's pesticide activities. This includes establishing tolerance levels for pesticides, such as maximum allowable levels in food; conducting special reviews of pesticides suspected of posing unreasonable risks; developing registration standards; and establishing research and monitoring needs.

During her 18-year career at EPA, Fenner-Crisp has served on many of the agency's risk-related organizations, including the Reference Dose Workgroup, the Risk Assessment Forum, the Risk Assessment Council, the Steering Committee of the Science Policy Council, and several technical committees on risk assessment guidelines.

Hank C. Jenkins-Smith, the director of the Institute for Public Policy and an associate professor of political science at the University of New Mexico, is the first recipient of the Society for Risk Analysis' Young Risk Analyst Award.

SRA is honoring Jenkins-Smith for his research on the application of technical analyses, such as risk assessment, cost-benefit analysis, and contingent valuation, to public policy problems. Recently, he has focused on how science and scientists become involved in technical policy disputes -- in particular, how scientists integrate deeply held values into scientific claims and how the public perceives scientists involved in technical disputes. He also has focused on the use of survey research to study public policy problems, measuring public and elite perceptions of policy issues such as the transportation of hazardous and radioactive materials, nuclear waste, and national security.

The results of his work have been published in his books Policy Change and Learning: An Advocacy Coalition Approach co-authored with Paul Sabatier (Westview Press; 1993) and Democratic Politics and Policy Analysis (Brooks/Cole; 1990) and in publications such as SRA's Risk Analysis: An International Journal.