Chemical Safety Advisory Committee Members

Members are appointed by the Administrator of EPA from nominations received. Members serve staggered terms of appointment, generally of two to three years' duration.

EPA issued a request for nominations in a June 12, 2015 Federal Register Notice. Nominations were due on or before July 13, 2015. Current CSAC panel members are listed below.

Chair

  • Dr. Kenneth M. Portier
    American Cancer Society

    Dr. Kenneth M. Portier is Vice President of the Statistics & Evaluation Center at the American Cancer Society (ACS) home office in Atlanta, GA, and Affiliate Professor of Biostatistics in the School of Public Health, Emory University. A native of south Louisiana, Dr. Portier holds an M.S. in Statistics (1975) and Ph.D. in Biostatistics (1979) from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Dr. Portier was a statistical consultant and teacher at the University of Florida for 27 years, working with researchers in agriculture, environment, natural resources, and environmental health. With ACS since early 2006, he provides administrative and statistical support on design and analysis of cross-sectional and longitudinal sample surveys, program evaluation and cancer modeling. He has participated in over 60 FIFRA-SAP meetings since 1999 and five SAB science review panels. In addition, Dr. Portier has served on expert and advisory panels for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), the National Toxicology Program (NTP), and the World Health Organization Food and Agriculture Organization (WHO/FAO). His research interests are wide, including the application of new statistical methodologies to cancer research and environmental health.

Members

  • Dr. Holly Davies
    Washington State Department of Ecology

    Dr. Holly Davies is a senior toxicologist in the Washington State Department of Ecology, the state environmental agency, where she leads the agency’s initiative to prevent and reduce toxic threats. She has experience in chemical policy, scientific research, and teaching. Her work at the Department of Ecology has focused on Chemical Action Plans to identify, characterize, and evaluate all uses and releases of a specific persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic chemical (PBT) or group of PBTs followed by a suite of recommended actions needed to protect human health and the environment. She is a member of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry and actively participates in the Children's Environmental Health Working Group within the Washington chapter of the Collaborative on Health and the Environment. She received her Ph.D. in Genetics from the University of Washington and her B.S. in Biology from Cornell University.

  • Dr. William Doucette
    Utah State University

    Dr. Bill Doucette is a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Utah State University (USU) and serves as the Associate Director of the Utah Water Research Laboratory. He is also a faculty member in the Toxicology Graduate Program and an Adjunct Professor in the Chemistry and Biochemistry and Geology Departments. Bill has B.S. and M.S. degrees in chemistry and a Ph.D. in Aquatic Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on the fate and behavior of organic contaminants in the environment, with emphasis on phytoremediation, the uptake of industrial chemicals into edible plants, the measurement and prediction of physical-chemical properties using Quantitative Structure Property Relationships (QSPRs), emission of chlorinated solvents into indoor air, and the environmental fate of pharmaceuticals.

  • Dr. Panos G. Georgopoulos
    Rutgers The State University

    Dr. Georgopoulos is a professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences, School of Public Health. Since 1989 he has served on the faculty of Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and on the Graduate Faculties of Chemical & Biochemical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers University. He is a member of the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute (EOHSI) of Rutgers, where he directs the Informatics and Computational Toxicology Core of the NIEHS Center for Environmental Exposures and Disease (CEED). Dr. Georgopoulos received his M.S. and Ph.D. Degrees in Chemical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and his Dipl. Ing. Degree from the National Technical University of Athens. At EOHSI he established and directs the Computational Chemodynamics Laboratory (CCL), a state-of-the-art facility for informatics and modeling of environmental and biological systems. The research and teaching activities of Dr. Georgopoulos at Rutgers have included development and implementation of innovative methods for high-content to high-throughput environmental risk analysis and informatics.

  • Dr. Kathleen M. Gilbert 
    University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences

    Dr. Kathleen Gilbert is a professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, and is based in the Arkansas Children’s Hospital Research Institute. She received her doctorate from Tulane University, and has worked for over 30 years as an immunologist and immunotoxicologist. Dr. Gilbert has served as the Director of the Arkansas Center for Environmental Exposure Research (ACEER) since its inception in 2002. Dr. Gilbert has served on several advisory panels for the EPA and the National Toxicology Program concerning the impact of chlorinated solvents as triggers of autoimmune disease and other types of toxicity. Her broad-based expertise is underlined by the fact that she has also served on NIH review panels for Digestive, Kidney and Urological Systems; Immunology; and Infectious Disease and Microbiology. Her environmental research has focused on how chronic exposure to low concentrations of immunotoxicants such as chlorinated solvents (e.g. trichloroethylene) or heavy metals can trigger autoimmune diseases.

  • Dr. John C. Kissel
    University of Washington

    Dr. Kissel is Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1990. He held a prior position in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University. Dr. Kissel holds a Ph.D. in Civil/Environmental Engineering from Stanford University, an S.M. in Environmental Engineering from Harvard University, and a B.S. in Civil Engineering from the University of Notre Dame. He is a registered Professional Engineer. Dr. Kissel's research interests generally involve human exposure assessment, with emphasis on exposures related to waste management, agricultural and residential use of pesticides, and consumer products. He is particularly interested in probabilistic prediction of aggregate exposure and reconciliation of model predictions with observed biomarker data. Dr. Kissel is a former President of the International Society of Exposure Science and also served one term as chair of the Exposure Assessment Specialty Group within the Society for Risk Analysis. He has served on two National Academy of Sciences Committees, multiple USEPA FIFRA Science Advisory Panels, EPA's Human Studies Review Board, and as a reviewer of the WHO environmental health criteria document on Dermal Exposure.

  • Dr. Bruce Perrin Lanphear
    Simon Fraser University 

    Bruce Lanphear, M.D., M.P.H., has published over thirty epidemiologic studies examining the relationship of environmental toxicants with intellectual delay, psychopathology, brain function, asthma and other health endpoints in children and young adults. These studies, which include both longitudinal and cross-sectional studies, tested the linkage of exposures to lead, PBDEs, tobacco or bisphenol A with IQ deficits, executive functions and ADHD in children. He has also conducted 7 community-based, randomized, controlled trials to test the efficacy of reducing environmental hazards on dust lead levels, children's lead concentrations, injuries, asthma symptoms or behavioral problems. He has been at the forefront of testing and validating the use of biomarkers of internal dose of environmental toxicants in birth cohorts -- including meconium, hair, urine, blood and serum -- and linking these biomarkers with neurobehavioral functions and other health endpoints in children.

  • Dr. Jaymie R. Meliker
    Stony Brook University

    Jaymie Meliker, Ph.D., is an academic scholar in the fields of exposure science and environmental epidemiology. His scholarship falls into two lines of inquiry: (1) identifying environmental factors that play important roles in disease morbidity, and (2) developing space-time methods that improve our ability to investigate exposure-disease relationships. Highlights of his work include pioneering development of space-time information systems for lifetime exposure reconstruction, and epidemiology of low-level exposure to arsenic in drinking water. He is an Associate Professor in the Program in Public Health, Department of Family, Population, and Preventive Medicine, Stony Brook University on Long Island, New York. He served as an elected councilor of the International Society of Exposure Science and was on the International Organizing Committee for the 2013 Annual Meeting in Basel, Switzerland. Dr. Meliker received his BA in Neuroscience from Oberlin College, and earned M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Environmental Health Sciences and a graduate certificate in spatial analysis/GIS all at the University of Michigan.

  • Dr. Daniel Schlenk
    University of California Riverside

    Daniel Schlenk, Ph.D. is Professor of Aquatic Ecotoxicology and Environmental Toxicology at the University of California Riverside. Dr. Schlenk received his Ph.D. in Toxicology from Oregon State University in 1989. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and from 2007-2014, he was a permanent member of the USEPA FIFRA Science Advisory Panel which he chaired from 2012-2014. From 2003-2006, he was a member of the Board of Directors for the North American Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry. He has been an ad hoc member for the USEPA Science Advisory Board for Aquatic Life Criteria Guidelines from the Ecological Processes and Effects Committee, and has participated in proposal review panels for the NSF, USEPA, NOAA, and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. His research interests focus upon mechanisms of action of pesticides, PAHs, and emerging compounds in aquatic organisms.

  • Dr. Kristina Thayer
    National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences

    Kristina Thayer, Ph.D. is Deputy Division Director of Analysis at the National Toxicology Program (NTP) and Director of the NTP Office of Health Assessment and Translation (OHAT) located on the campus of the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). As Deputy Division Director of Analysis, she oversees OHAT and the NTP Office of the Report on Carcinogens (ORoC). Before becoming director of OHAT, she held positions in the NTP Office of Liaison, Policy, and Review, the NIEHS Office of Risk Assessment Research, and the NTP Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction (CERHR). Prior to joining the NTP/NIEHS, she was a senior scientist at the World Wildlife Fund and then at the Environmental Working Group. She is considered an expert on the application of systematic review methods to environmental health topic. In addition to overseeing the development of OHAT and ORoC monographs, she has research interests in the areas of evaluating the predictive utility of high throughput screening data, understanding the role of environmental exposures in diabetes and obesity, and exposure assessment.