Source: RISK newsletter,
Fourth Quarter 1995, published by the Society for Risk Analysis
When incoming SRA President John D. Graham accepts the gavel from outgoing President M. Elisabeth Paté-Cornell at the 1995 SRA Annual Meeting in Honolulu, he will tackle what he terms the “bread and butter” challenges of the Society. These challenges include recruiting new members, targeting fund raising for support, visiting SRA chapters, raising the Society’s visibility in the U.S. policy community, and extending the Society’s reach internationally.
Another task high on his agenda is promoting new ways of rewarding innovative practitioners of risk analysis, possibly giving occasional awards that recognize outstanding work. He also hopes to stimulate a rigorous evaluation of university-based curricula on risk, as well as discussion on how university-based training can be strengthened. In addition, he wants to broaden SRA’s current focus on health risk assessments for chemicals and ionizing radiation to include problems such as non-ionizing radiation, accidents, violence in the home and community, genetic effects, ecological hazards, and dietary and nutritional factors in disease. All these activities will follow his busy year as chair of the 1995 Annual Meeting Committee.
A professor of policy and decision sciences at the Harvard School of Public Health, Graham teaches the methods of risk analysis and benefit-cost analysis. His primary research objective is to distinguish public policies that can save lives and reduce injury or chronic disease at a reasonable cost from those policies that are not cost effective. As a scholar, he is best known for Harvard’s “Lifesaving Priorities Project,” which produced a computerized data base on the relative costs and effectiveness of 500 lifesaving policies in medicine, injury prevention, and toxin control. His interest in building institutions that respond to urgent societal needs led him to found the Harvard Injury Control Center and the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, both of which he currently leads.
Graham has been active in influencing the policy-making process, beginning in the 1980s when his early cost-benefit analysis of automobile airbag technology was cited in pro-airbag decisions by both the U.S. Supreme Court and former Secretary of Transportation Elizabeth Dole. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan praised him as a pioneer in bringing risk analysis to the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, and in 1991 Surgeon General Antonia Novello gave him the “Award for Outstanding Service in Helping to Develop and Support the National Agenda for Injury Control.” Since 1994, he has testified at more than ten congressional hearings on the need for better use of risk analysis in federal regulatory decisions. Most recently, he has worked with both senators and representatives on a bipartisan legislative proposal to reform health, safety, and environmental regulation. Over the years he has served on several National Academy of Sciences committees and on advisory committees to other government agencies and corporations.
Graham has a bachelor of arts degree from Wake Forest
University and a master of arts degree from Duke University. He
completed his Ph.D. in public policy at Carnegie Mellon
University in 1983.