RISK newsletter:
Nominations for 1995 SRA Elections Announced

Source: The Society for Risk Analysis' RISK newsletter, Third Quarter 1995

The Society for Risk Analysis Nominating Committee, which is chaired by former SRA President James D. Wilson of the Center for Risk Management, Resources for the Future, has announced the nominations for the 1995 SRA elections to be held this fall. The committee members include Alison C. Cullen of the University of Washington, Clifford S. Duke of CommonSense Environmental, Robert G. Hetes of Research Triangle Institute, Stanley H. Levinson of B & W Nuclear Technologies, Linda-Jo Schierow of the Congressional Research Service, and Daniel R. Smith of SCIENTECH Inc.

The Society will choose a president-elect, a secretary for a two-year term, and three councilors, each for three-year terms. The nominees for these positions are introduced below.

President-elect: Kasperson vs. Zimmerman

Roger E. Kasperson has been provost at Clark University since 1992, where he is also a senior researcher at the Center for Technology, Environment, and Development (CENTED) and the George Perkins Marsh Institute. He has a B.A. from Clark University and an M.A. and a Ph.D., both in geography, from the University of Chicago. He has written numerous books and publications on technological risks, risk communication, risk policy, radioactive wastes, and global environmental change. His latest book Regions at Risk: Comparisons of Threatened Environments (United Nations University Press) will be released in September.

Kasperson chairs the International Geographical Union's Commission on Critical Environmental Situations and Regions, which has over 200 members in 42 countries, and is a member of the Social Science Research Council Committee on Global Environmental Change Research. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has been honored for his work on environmental hazards by the Association of American Geographers. He has served on numerous committees of the National Research Council and the National Science Foundation, as well as the subcommittee on risk reduction strategies for the Science Advisory Board's report to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Reducing Risk: Setting Priorities and Strategies for Environmental Protection (1992).

A charter member of SRA, Kasperson served on the SRA Council in 1989-93 and was general program chair of the 1986 SRA Annual Meeting. He has also served on the editorial board of Risk Analysis.

Rae Zimmerman is professor of planning and public administration at New York University, where she has been a member of the faculty since 1973. She initiated and directs the university's Summer Institute in Risk Management in Environmental Health and Protection, including quantitative risk assessment. She has a B.A. in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley, a master's degree in city planning from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Ph.D. in planning from Columbia University. She has conducted research in and teaches environmental management, risk communication, public perceptions of environmental risk, water quality, hazardous wastes, chemical usage, and transportation. Her recent research has focused on socioeconomic characteristics of communities with inactive hazardous waste sites and their implications for environmental equity policy, and she will be directing an environmental and transportation infrastructure performance project that includes safety and health risk issues of engineered systems. She has been a consultant with engineering firms and government, including the EPA. Her publications include Governmental Management of Chemical Risk (Lewis Publishers Inc., 1990) and, most recently, "When Studies Collide: Meta-analysis and Rules of Evidence for Environmental Health Policy Applications to Benzene, Dioxins, and Formaldehyde" (Policy Studies Journal, 1995), as well as articles on the 1993 Mississippi floods in The Sciences (1994) and environmental equity in Fordham Urban Law Journal (1994) and Risk Analysis (1993)

Among her professional activities, Zimmerman has served on panels for the Risk Science Institute of the International Life Sciences Institute, Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, the U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment, and the American Arbitration Association. Currently, she is on an advisory panel of the National Science Foundation's Decision, Risk, and Management Science Program.

A charter member of SRA, Zimmerman served as a councilor in 1991-94, has chaired the Sections and Chapters Committee since 1992, and is a member of the Gifts and Grants Committee. Her participation in SRA annual meetings includes organizing panel sessions and coordinating a social science track. She is a co-founder and a former president of the SRA Metropolitan Chapter (CT-NJ-NY).

Secretary: Flamm vs. Hakkinen

W. Gary Flamm is president of Flamm Associates, consultants in toxicology and food and drug regulations (see Member News). He holds a B.S. in pharmacy, an M.S. in pharmaceutical chemistry, and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Cincinnati Medical School. His career in the U.S. Public Health Service spanned 25 years at the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, where he was involved in health and safety evaluation of chemicals and their regulations and held several high-level positions. He is an internationally recognized authority in risk and safety evaluation of carcinogens and other toxic agents and several times has given testimony on the safety of substances in the food supply before the U.S. Congress. In addition, he has held academic appointments in several major universities.

In 1985 Flamm was named one of the first two fellows of the American College of Toxicology, for which he is a former president. He is also a past president of the International Society for Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology. He serves on the editorial boards of seven journals addressing toxicological and risk assessment subjects and the newsletter Guide to U.S. Food Safety Law.

Flamm, a charter member of SRA, was elected SRA secretary in 1993 and will complete his two-year term in December. He is a former SRA councilor (1987-90) and has served on the editorial board of Risk Analysis.

Perrti J. (Bert) Hakkinen is a senior scientist in toxicology and risk assessment with Procter & Gamble Company in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he conducts human exposure and risk assessments for numerous consumer products. He has a B.A. in biochemistry and molecular biology from the University of California at Santa Barbara and a Ph.D. in comparative pharmacology and toxicology from the university's San Francisco campus. Before joining Procter & Gamble, he was a postdoctoral investigator in toxicology and in exposure and risk assessment at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Hakkinen has chaired the Chemical Manufacturers Association's Exposure Assessment Task Group since 1991. He has been an invited expert at several U.S. Environmental Protection Agency-sponsored workshops to develop or revise human exposure assessment guidance and resource documents and is a lecturer on exposure and risk assessment at the University of Cincinnati. He was on the editorial board of Toxicology for eight years and has been invited to be a co-editor of Information Resources in Toxicology, Third Edition.

A charter member of SRA, Hakkinen is a councilor and former president of SRA's Ohio Chapter. In 1991, he originated the SRA Exposure Assessment Specialty Group's "Reference House" effort and, in 1992 and 1993, co-organized two SRA Annual Meeting workshops related to that effort. This led to the Residential Exposure Assessment Project for which Hakkinen is an editorial committee member .

Councilor: Evans vs. Jarabek

John S. Evans is senior lecturer on environmental science and directs the environmental health and public policy program at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is also a core faculty member at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis. Previously he was a bioenvironmental engineer in the U.S. Air Force and a fellow with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards. He has a B.S.E. in industrial engineering and an M.S. in water resources management from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and both an S.M. and a Sc.D. in environmental health sciences from Harvard. His research has focused on characterizing uncertainty in estimates of environmental exposure and risks and on analyzing the value of improved information in support of environmental health decisions. Evans has sought to expand the role of risk assessment in environmental decision making outside the United States through his involvement with courses, workshops, and risk assessment activities in several countries.

A charter member of SRA, Evans has served on the Risk Analysis editorial board since 1988, was the SRA New England Chapter president (1988-89), and is a 1995 SRA Annual Meeting Committee member.

Annie M. Jarabek is a toxicologist for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Research and Development in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, with a B.S. in biology from the University of Notre Dame and graduate work in inhalation toxicology at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center. She is the principal author of the EPA methods to derive inhalation reference concentrations (RfCs) that incorporate dosimetry modeling of inhaled particles and gases to improve characterization of dose and has written over 20 publications on the topic of dose-response assessment. She served six years as co-chair of EPA's intra-agency work group on noncancer dose-response assessment. She is now working on implementation of the benchmark approach and has developed a Bayesian approach that allows for statistical combination of dose-response estimates.

Jarabek, an SRA member since 1989, is a past president of the SRA Research Triangle Chapter. She has also served as a chapter councilor and as the organizer of its 1993 and 1994 annual symposia. In addition, she was a member of the organizing committee of the 1993 SRA Annual Meeting, for which she also organized the symposium on biological markers in exposure-dose-response assessment.

Councilor: Menzie vs. Starr

Charles A. Menzie is founder and president of Menzie-Cura & Associates Inc., Chelmsford, Massachusetts, which is internationally recognized in human health and ecological risk assessment. He holds a B.S. in biology from Manhattan College, an M.A. in biology from College of New York, and a Ph.D. in environmental science from City University of New York. With over 20 years of professional experience, his work has included managing large-scale risk assessments relating to chemical manufacturing plant siting, new energy technologies, synfuel facilities, landfills, radioactive and mixed waste disposal, land redevelopment, no-migration petitions, hazardous waste and Superfund sites, and natural resource damage. He has also developed risk assessment guidance for the Gas Research Institute and the Electric Power Research Institute, facilitated peer reviews of risk assessment case studies for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Risk Forum, and presented numerous seminars on conducting risk assessment for the mining, utility, and oil and gas industries.

Menzie joined SRA in 1987, is a past president of the SRA New England Chapter, and has organized several SRA annual meeting sessions on ecological risk assessment. He is a liaison between SRA and the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry.

Thomas B. Starr is a principal in the health sciences division of ENVIRON Corporation in Raleigh, North Carolina. He has a B.A. in theoretical physics from Hamilton College and an M.S. and a Ph.D., both in theoretical physics, from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he also held National Science Foundation postdoctoral and faculty appointments in the university's Institute for Environmental Studies. Before joining ENVIRON, he served on the staff of the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology, first as a senior scientist in the epidemiology department and then as the director of the risk assessment program. His research interests have focused on the means for explicitly incorporating knowledge of toxic mechanisms into the quantitative risk assessment process and on improving epidemiologic methods for assessing effects of chemical exposure on worker health. He has also served as an adjunct faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and in an advisory capacity on panels and committees at both national and state levels. He currently is on the Secretary's Scientific Advisory Board on Toxic Air Pollutants for the North Carolina Department of Environmental Health and Natural Resources.

Starr, a member of SRA since 1982, is a past president of SRA's Research Triangle Chapter. Among his activities in numerous professional societies, he served as the first president of the Society of Toxicology's Specialty Section on Risk Assessment.

Councilor: Mulvihill vs. Stamatelatos

Robert J. Mulvihill of PRC Inc., El Segundo, California, has 39 years of experience in technical management and in mechanical, industrial, nuclear, and marine engineering, including industrial and military safety, quality assurance, reliability/availability/maintainability, and cost-effectiveness applications. He has a B.S. in marine engineering from State University of New York, an M.S. in mechanical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. in engineering from California Coast University.

For 25 years Mulvihill has pioneered the use of reliability and risk assessment techniques, which he has recently applied to the architect-engineering design process. Currently he is directing a support effort for the Lockheed Martin Denver probabilistic risk assessment for the Titan and Centaur launch vehicles as part of the CASSINI mission safety analysis. Previously he has served as the manager of probabilistic risk assessments for several National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) projects, including the Galileo and Ulysses space missions, the Langley 8-foot High Temperature Wind Tunnel, the Liquid Hydrogen Structural Test Facility, and the Advanced Solid Rocket Motor Propellant Manufacturing Facility.

Mulvilhill, an SRA member since 1987, has chaired SRA's Engineering Specialty Group since 1992 and is a former president of SRA's Southern California Chapter. He also chaired a short course for the 1994 International Conference on Probabilistic Safety Assessment and Management PSAM-II.

Michael G. Stamatelatos is vice president of SCIENTECH Inc., San Diego, California, and manager of its Western Region, as well as its international and risk assessment and management programs. He has a B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in nuclear science and engineering from Columbia University. In his 31-year professional career, he has held numerous industry, national laboratory, and university positions and has become a recognized expert in safety and risk and reliability assessment. He has managed assessment programs for a number of nuclear power plants, both in the United States and in other countries, as well as for research, space, and defense reactors; chemical installations; and chemical munitions demilitarization facilities. He has also participated in the reviews of the Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) Procedures Guide, the development of a PRA procedures guide for advanced reactors, the National Science Foundation review of PRA methods (NUREG-1050), and reviews of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission probabilistic safety document NUREG-1150. In addition, he has served as a safety, risk, and reliability expert for the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Stamatelatos, a charter member of SRA, is a former president and councilor of SRA's Southern California Chapter. Among his many professional activities, he chaired PSAM-II in 1994 and was a co-organizer of PSAM-I in 1991.

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