Biomonitoring of exposure to environmental chemicals and toxins

Dana Boyd Barr

Professor of Exposure Science and Environmental Health

Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University

Dr. Dana Boyd Barr is a Professor of Exposure Science and Environmental Health at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, Department of Environmental Health.  Although she has been in academia for less than two years, she has worked to successfully establish a team of cohort studies evaluating maternal-child health, paternal reproductive health, and farmworker safety in Thailand.  She is also collaborating on several child and farmworker cohorts in the United States.  In addition, she just received funding to evaluate brominated flame retardant exposures and thyroid function in small children.  Prior to joining Emory, Dr. Barr was employed at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for 22 years. During her tenure at CDC, she devoted much of her time to the development of methods for assessing human exposure to a variety of environmental toxicants including current-use pesticides, phthalates, organochlorine chemicals (pesticides and PCBs), phytoestrogens, diethylene glycol, methyl eugenol, vinyl chloride and others.  Dr. Barr has authored or coauthored over 300 peer-reviewed publications, book chapters and many published abstracts.  Some of these papers have been landmark papers showing human exposure to pesticides in the general population and determining appropriate matrices for biomonitoring at each life stage.  She is the current President of the International Society of Exposure Science (ISES; formerly ISEA) and previously served as its treasurer; she just completed a 5-year term as  Editor- in-Chief of ISES’s official journal, Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology.  She is also an active member of the International Society of Environmental Epidemiology, Society of Toxicology, American Chemical Society, American Society for Mass Spectrometry, and the Association of Official Analytical Chemists.  She has served many important roles in the field of exposure assessment including serving on EPA review boards such as the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act Scientific Advisory Panel, chairing and cochairing sessions at international and domestic meetings, serving on the National Children’s Study working group for chemical exposures, serving as an international expert in pesticide methodology and exposure assessment, serving on the German Research Foundation’s Committee for Standardizing Analytical Methods for Occupational and Environmental Chemistry, and serving on ILSI/HESI’s steering and technical committees for the Integration of Biomonitoring Data into Risk Assessment.  As a result of her efforts, Dr. Barr has received many awards including ISEA’s Daisy Award for Outstanding Investigator, two HHS Secretary’s awards for exposure-health investigations involving diethylene glycol and methylparathion poisoning, 2004 Federal Scientific Employee of the Year, CDC’s Mackel Award for outstanding collaboration among epidemiology and laboratory, and EPA’s Silver Medal for outstanding contributions to the development of protocols for the National Children’s Study.  Dr. Barr received her BS in Biology from Brenau University in 1987 and her Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry from Georgia State University in 1994.

This webinar was held  on December 2, 2011.  You can stream the WebEx recording here.

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