Proseminar Fall 2010
"Journal Club and Special Topics"
Got ideas? Got suggestions? Wanna share feedback?
E-mail Deb Watkins at debw@bu.edu or Traci Bethea at tnb@bu.edu
Tentative Schedule
The dates will be listed here as soon as the calendar has been finalized.
| Date | Topic | Articles | Additional Info |
| September 3 | Introduction/Planning Meeting | ||
| September 10 | Student Meeting with Dr. Godleski | In preparation, please read/review the readings posted for Dr. Godleski's seminar. | |
| September 17 | Planning Meeting | Please bring 1-2 articles for journal club and 1-2 ideas for proseminar. | |
| September 24 | Student Meeting with Dr. John Durant and some of his engineering students. | Please read/review the readings posted for Dr. Durant's seminar. | |
| October 1 | Department Update | Mike McClean | Please email either Deb or Traci if there is something specific you want to hear about |
| October 8 | Lunch with Seminar Speaker Wig Zamore | Check your e-mail for a message from Kevin that has a link to some videos instead of readings. | |
| October 15 | Journal Club: We will meet with Dr. Jon Levy and discuss a paper on science and decision-making that he co-authored. | RiskAssessment.pdf
| Dr. Levy suggested looking at this article, which was actually written as a counter-argument to a critique of the report: RiskPolicy.pdf.
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| October 22 | Lunch with Seminar Speaker | ||
| October 29 | 2010 Health Law Conference
(no proseminar) | Keynote Speaker: Roberta White PhD | Conference held at BU Law School, 8:45 to 4:30. Keynote Address at 9 am |
| November 5 | SAS tips and tricks | Link to SAS Reference Documents that you can download | Please bring any SAS tips you think may be helpful to other students |
| November 12 | Veteran's Day | ||
| November 19 | EH Department Research Retreat | ||
| November 26 | Thanksgiving Break | ||
| December 3 | Journal Club: We will meet with the seminar speaker, Doug Brugge. | Please read/review the readings posted for Dr. Brugge's seminar. | |
| December 10 | Proseminar - Future Planning | Mike McClean | |
| December 17 | Departmental Holiday Party |
Journal Articles
During the semester, we will discuss 3 articles in journal clubs that are not from speaker presentations. The abstracts and the attachments are posted below.
- At the request of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Research Council (NRC) recently completed a major report, Science and Decisions: Advancing Risk Assessment, that is intended to strengthen the scientific basis, credibility, and effectiveness of risk assessment practices and subsequent risk management decisions. The report describes the challenges faced by risk assessment and the need to consider improvements in both the technical analyses of risk assessments (i.e., the development and use of scientific information to improve risk characterization) and the utility of risk assessments (i.e., making assessments more relevant and useful for risk management decisions). The report tackles a number of topics relating to improvements in the process, including the design and framing of risk assessments, uncertainty and variability characterization, selection and use of defaults, unification of cancer and noncancer dose-response assessment, cumulative risk assessment, and the need to increase EPA’s capacity to address these improvements. This article describes and summarizes the NRC report, with an eye toward its implications for risk assessment practices at EPA. The article can be downloaded here: Attach:RiskAssessment.pdf
- The results of dermal absorption experiments are routinely and often exclusively reported in terms of fractional absorption. However, fractional absorption is not generally independent of skin loading conditions. As a consequence, experimental outcomes are commonly misinterpreted. This can lead in turn to poor estimation of exposures under field conditions and inadequate threat assessment. To aid interpretation of dermal absorption-related phenomena, a dimensionless group representing the ratio of mass delivery to plausible absorptive flux under experimental or environmental conditions is proposed. High values of the dimensionless dermal number (NDERM) connote surplus supply (i.e., flux-limited) conditions. Under such conditions, fractional absorption will generally depend on load and should not be assumed transferable to other conditions. At low values of NDERM, dermal absorption will be delivery-limited. Under those conditions, high fractional absorption is feasible barring maldistribution or depletion due to volatilization, washing, mechanical abrasion or other means. Similar logic also applies to skin sampling and dermal toxicity testing. Skin surface sampling at low NDERM is unlikely to provide an appropriate measure of potential dermal dose due to depletion, whereas dermal toxicity testing at high NDERM is unlikely to show dose dependence due to saturation. The article can be downloaded here: Attach:Kissel_Dermal.pdf.
- Objectives. We evaluated whether neighborhood characteristics correlated with early neurodevelopment and whether these characteristics confounded the previously reported association between exposure to chlorpyrifos (an organophosphate insecticide) and neurodevelopment. Methods. We obtained prenatal addresses, chlorpyrifos exposure data, and 36-month Psychomotor Development Index (PDI) and Mental Development Index (MDI) scores for a birth cohort in New York City (born 1998–2002). We used data from the 2000 US Census to estimate measures of physical infrastructure, socioeconomic status, crowding, demographic composition, and linguistic isolation for 1-kilometer network areas around each child’s prenatal address. Generalized estimating equations were adjusted for demographics, maternal education and IQ, prenatal exposure to tobacco smoke, caretaking environment quality, and building dilapidation. Results. Of 266 children included as participants, 47% were male, 59% were Dominican, and 41% were African American. For each standard deviation higher in neighborhood percent poverty, the PDI score was 2.6 points lower (95% confidence interval [CI]=–3.7, –1.5), and the MDI score was 1.7 points lower (95% CI=–2.6, –0.8). Neighborhood-level confounding of the chlorpyrifos-neurodevelopment association was not apparent. Conclusions. Neighborhood context and chlorpyrifos exposure were independently associated with neurodevelopment, thus providing distinct opportunities for health promotion. The article can be downloaded here: Attach:Lovasi_Chlorpyrifos.pdf.
Topics for Proseminar
We will update the list of topics once the doctoral student meeting has taken place and topics have been chosen.
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