Source: RISK newsletter,
First Quarter 1996, published by the Society for Risk Analysis
For the third successive year, the Society for Risk Analysis has chosen an educator as its leader. It was announced at SRA's 1995 Annual Meeting that the Society's next president-elect is Rae Zimmerman, professor of planning and public administration at New York University's Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, where she developed and manages the school's environmental curriculum, including its Summer Institute in Risk Management in Environmental Health and Protection.
Zimmerman will serve as a member of the Society's Executive Committee this year and will become president in December 1996, when she succeeds the current president, John D. Graham.
Plans for 1996 Meeting
As president-elect, Zimmerman chairs the committee that is planning SRA's 1996 Annual Meeting, which will be a joint meeting with the International Society of Exposure Analysis (ISEA) and will be held December 8-11 in New Orleans, Louisiana, at the Fairmont Hotel at University Place in the city's financial district.
Zimmerman says that the aim of the 1996 meeting will be to create opportunities for SRA's numerous disciplines to address risk problems in an interdisciplinary manner.
"Barriers among the disciplines must continue to be broken down if risk assessment and risk management are to support the important debates underway in risk regulation and reform," she says, adding that conference organization and themes will underscore this by enhancing interdisciplinary thinking. For example, interdisciplinary themes that have already been proposed by and discussed with members include integrating animal experimentation and epidemiology in dose-response estimation, incorporating environmental equity into the development of exposure factors by accounting for racial and ethnic differences in food consumption, and designing risk-based standards that reflect public perceptions and can be effectively communicated. Thomas E. McKone, SRA councilor and member of the conference planning team, is co-directing the joint ISEA-SRA effort to integrate exposure assessment with a variety of SRA themes.
The risk regulation and reform debate will also continue to be addressed at the 1996 meeting, with major players invited to express their views. In addition there will be a continuing commitment to international themes as well as an emphasis upon risk issues in the region of New Orleans.
Goals for the Society
Zimmerman's vision of the Society's future reflects her own interdisciplinary thinking. "New issues have arisen in the risk arena, and the nearly two decades of experience in risk assessment, management and communication is of enormous value in addressing them," she says. In doing so, the Society must focus on several questions: How can SRA be an active player in regulatory reform and still retain a nonpartisan stance? How can the science of risk assessment be flexible enough to accommodate wide swings in policy? And how can the science be communicated effectively to policy makers, politicians, and the public?
"Our strength as a professional society will be determined by our ability to continue to organize and intensify our efforts on cutting-edge issues," she said, "in particular, the process by which risk assessment is used in decision making."
The Society should also diversify and expand its interests in risk management to more actively include mainstream social scientists to contribute to debates in the medical, natural and physical sciences and engineering, she says. "In short, promoting interdisciplinary and integrated research should continue to be a major direction for the Society, and resources for such research should be redirected to that end. The development and strengthening of networks among the professional societies is one aspect of this."
Zimmerman's interests have been interdisciplinary for some time. She is currently directing a team of engineers, social scientists, and management professionals who are addressing urban infrastructure performance in research funded by the National Science Foundation. She is also conducting research on the influence of environmental attitudes of farmers on their use of pesticide alternatives, funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Her recent publications have focused on environmental epidemiology, floodplain management, environmental equity, and global warming impacts on urban infrastructure.
She has a B.A. in chemistry from the University of California (Berkeley), a master's degree in city planning from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Ph.D. in planning from Columbia University. Before joining NYU, she was a physical scientist at EPA working on water quality and currently works with the agency on environmental equity issues associated with hazardous waste sites.
A charter member of SRA, she has served as a councilor (1991-1994) and as a reviewer for the journal. She is also the cofounder and former president of the Society's Metropolitan (CT-NJ-NY) Chapter.
Flamm Reelected Secretary
In addition to the president-elect, the Society elected a secretary and three councilors.
W. Gary Flamm, president of Flamm Associates, was reelected as the Society's secretary and will serve his second two-year term. He is recognized as an international authority in the risk and safety evaluation of carcinogens and other toxic agents and for his accomplishments in establishing a better understanding between government and industry in areas of safety evaluation. During his career he has held positions at the U.S. National Institutes of Health and U.S. Food and Drug Administration, as well as academic appointments in several universities. Among many honors, he is a fellow and former president of the American College of Toxicology and past president of the International Society for Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology. He serves on the editorial boards of seven journals which address toxicological and risk assessment subjects and the newsletter Guide to U.S. Food Safety Law and has published over 100 papers in journals and books. He has a B.S. in pharmacy, an M.S. in pharmaceutical chemistry, and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Cincinnati Medical School. He is a charter member of SRA and has served on the council and the Risk Analysis editorial board.
Jarabek, Menzie, and Mulvihill Elected Councilors
The three new councilors, who will serve through 1998, are as follows:
Annie M. Jarabek is a toxicologist for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Research and Development. She is the principal author of the EPA's methods to derive inhalation reference concentrations that incorporate dosimetry modeling of inhaled particles and gases to improve characterization of dose and has written over 20 publications on dose-response assessment. She has also contributed to the practice of using dosimetry modeling for route-to-route extrapolation. Her experience includes cochairing the EPA work group of scientists on non-cancer dose-response assessment and giving expert peer review for the guidance document on dermal exposure assessment. She is working now on implementation of the benchmark approach for dose-response modeling and has developed a Bayesian application which is similar but also provides for statistical combination of dose-response estimates. She has a B.S. in biology from Notre Dame University and has done graduate work in inhalation toxicology at the University of Cincinnati Medical School. Since joining SRA in 1989, she has served as a president and councilor of the Research Triangle Chapter and a member of the 1993 SRA Annual Meeting organizing committee.
Charles A. Menzie is founder and president of Menzie-Cura & Associates Inc., which is internationally recognized for human health and ecological risk assessment. With over 20 years of experience, he has managed risk assessments related to chemical manufacturing plant siting, new energy technologies, synthetic fuel 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 Gas Research Institute and Electric Power Research Institute and facilitated expert peer review of risk assessment case studies for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Risk Forum. He has a B.S. in biology from Manhattan College, an M.A. in biology from the College of New York, and a Ph.D. in environmental science from City University of New York. Since joining SRA in 1987, he has served as president of the New England Chapter and has organized several annual meeting sessions on ecological risk assessment. He is a liaison between SRA and the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry.
Robert J. Mulvihill is the founder of Risk Management
and Analysis Inc., which is dedicated to the risk assessment of
aerospace, chemical, nuclear, and other industrial systems and
associated processes. His experience includes technical
management and mechanical, industrial, nuclear, and marine
engineering. For the past 25 years, he has pioneered the
application of reliability, maintainability, human factors
engineering, and risk assessment techniques, which he has
recently applied to the architect-engineering design process. His
recent publications include several papers on the application of
risk analysis to space, chemical, and industrial plant safety. In
1995, he lectured on energy systems, risk analysis, and
reliability at the Pakistan Nathiagali International Summer
College. He is a director on the board of the International
Association for Probabilistic Safety Assessment and Management.
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. An SRA member since 1987, he has
served as president of the Southern California Chapter and is
chair of the Engineering Specialty Group.