D
Committee and Staff Biographies
COMMITTEE
John C. Bailar III is Professor Emeritus of the University of Chicago and has been an Institute of Medicine (IOM) member since 1993. He holds both an M.D. and a Ph.D. His primary areas of expertise are epidemiology and biostatistics. More specifically he has interests that include risk assessment, especially of chemical hazards and air pollutants; biostatistics and epidemiology, especially as related to cancer; misconduct in science; combining research results; and Persian Gulf syndrome. Dr. Bailar has chaired six National Research Council (NRC) studies and has been a member of many more. He is also currently a member of the National Academies Report Review Committee.
Lisa M. Brosseau is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota. She received her Sc.D. in Environmental Health Sciences, Industrial Hygiene, from Harvard University. Her research interests include performance of respiratory protection devices, aerosol measurement, filtration, and health and safety interventions in small businesses.
Howard J. Cohen is a Professor and Chair of the Occupational Safety and Health program at the University of New Haven. He formerly was the Manager of Industrial Hygiene at the Olin Corporation and Editor in Chief of the American Industrial Hygiene Association Journal. He is a graduate of Boston University where he received a B.A. degree in Biology. Dr. Cohen received his Masters of Public Health and Doctorate of Philosophy degrees in Industrial Health from the University of Michigan.
He is certified in the comprehensive practice of industrial hygiene (CIH) by the American Board of Industrial Hygiene. Dr. Cohen is the past chair of the ANSI Z88.2 committee on respiratory protection and a current member of the editorial board of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene. He is the past chair of the American Industrial Hygiene Association’s respiratory protection committee, a past president of the Connecticut River Valley Chapter of the American Industrial Hygiene Association, and a past officer and treasurer of the American Board of Industrial Hygiene.
Alan Hack is retired from the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). He is certified in Comprehensive Practice of Industrial Hygiene (CIH) and is a Certified Safety Professional (CSP). He has a Masters in Industrial Safety that he received in 1967 from New York University. He has extensive experience with facial measurements and respirator fit testing. Mr. Hack is currently working as a consultant. He is a member of two committees: the ANSI Committee on Respiratory Protection and the American Industrial Hygiene Association Committee on Respiratory Protection.
Subhash R. Lele is a Professor in the Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences at the University of Alberta. He has a Ph.D. in Statistics from Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Lele has expertise in statistical analysis of forms and shapes with applications in medicine, spatial data analysis and its applications in public health, ecology, and environmental sciences.
Youcheng Liu is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Yale University. He received his M.D. in 1983 from Nanjing Medical University, an M.P.H. in Environmental Health Sciences in 1987 from Peking University School of Public Health, an M.S. in Environmental Health in 1994 and a Sc.D. in Industrial Hygiene in 1997, both from the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Liu’s expertise is in exposure assessment and modeling, indoor air sciences, industrial hygiene, and occupational epidemiology, with considerable expertise in respirator fit testing and respirator workplace performance evaluation.
Knut Ringen is a private consultant in disease management, environment, safety and health risk management, workers’ compensation, and group health insurance. Dr. Ringen specializes in the development of research and service programs with an emphasis on workers and other special populations, and has been instrumental in developing many health programs that have achieved national significance. Among many honors, he is elected to the European Academy of Sciences and the Collegium Ramazzini. He received his Doctor of Public Health degree from Johns Hopkins University for his research on the development of health policy, a Master’s degree in hospital administration from the Medical College of Virginia, and a Master’s of Public Health degree from Johns Hopkins University.
Joan T. Richtsmeier is a Professor of Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Richtsmeier received her Bachelor’s degree from St. Mary’s College in 1977, her Master’s degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1979 and her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Northwestern University in 1986. She conducted postdoctoral research at Northwestern University Medical School before joining the faculty of the Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as Assistant Professor in 1987. She became Full Professor of Cell Biology and Anatomy in 1999. Dr. Richtsmeier moved her laboratory to the Department of Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University in 2000. Dr. Richtsmeier’s interests include craniofacial growth and evolution, quantitative morphology, the relationship between ontogenetic mechanisms and phylogenetic change, and the molecular basis of craniofacial development. Her current research focuses on phenotype-genotype correlations in craniosynostosis and craniofacial dysmorphology in Down syndrome.
Javier Rojo is a Professor of Statistics at Rice University. He holds a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include nonparametric statistics, survival analysis reliability, decision theory, and partial orders of probability distributions. Dr. Rojo was Program Director for Probability and Statistics at the National Science Foundation and is an elected Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, the American Statistical Association, and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. Dr. Rojo was a member of the Committee on Fellows of the American Statistical Society and chaired the committee in
2004. He is a member of several advisory boards and Director of the Summer Institute of Statistics—an REU NSF/NSA-supported center at Rice University.
Albert A. Sciarretta is President of CNS Technologies, Inc. His company conducts assessments of advanced military technologies, as well as designs and executes operational demonstrations and experiments. He has a background in human factors engineering and recently designed a test scenario for assessing human performance in a combat environment. His expertise includes adapting commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technology for military use. He is a retired Army officer with two Master’s degrees: one in Operations Research and the other in Mechanical Engineering; both were obtained at Stanford University in 1984. Mr. Sciarretta has worked on many NRC study committees in the past.
STAFF
Emily Ann Meyer is a program officer at the IOM. She earned a law degree at Hamline University, where she also served as a research fellow. Prior to coming to IOM, she worked in the Division of Engineering and Physical Sciences’ National Materials Advisory Board. More recently, she was the study director for the IOM committee that produced the report Cord Blood: Establishing a National Stem Cell Bank Program. She is currently directing the study on Evaluating the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health Head-and-Face Survey of U.S. Respirator Users.
Andrew Pope is director of the board on Health Sciences Policy in the Institute of Medicine. With a Ph.D. in physiology and biochemistry, his primary interests are in science policy, biomedical ethics, and the environmental and occupational influences on human health. During his tenure at the National Academies, and since 1989 at the Institute of Medicine, Dr. Pope has directed numerous studies on topics that range from injury control, disability prevention, and biologic markers to the protection of human subjects of research, National Institutes of Health priority-setting processes, organ procurement and transplantation policy, and the role of science and technology in countering terrorism. Dr. Pope
is the recipient of the National Academy of Sciences President’s Special Achievement Award and the Institute of Medicine’s Cecil Award.
Bruce M. Altevogt is a senior program officer in the Board on Health Sciences Policy at the Institute of Medicine. He received his doctorate from Harvard University’s Program in Neuroscience. While at Harvard, Dr. Altevogt studied how the glial cells in the central and peripheral nervous system form a network of cells through intracellular communication, which is critical for maintaining myelin. Following his Ph.D., Dr. Altevogt was a policy fellow with the Christine Mirzayan Science & Technology Policy Graduate Fellowship Program at the National Academies. He has over 10 years of research experience. In addition to Dr. Altevogt’s work at Harvard, he also performed neuroscience research at National Institutes of Health and University of Virginia. He received his B.A. from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville where he majored in biology and minored in South Asian studies. Since joining the Board on Health Sciences Policy, he was a program officer on the IOM studies Spinal Cord Injury: Progress, Promise, and Priorities and Sleep Disorders and Sleep Deprivation: An Unmet Public Health Problem, he is serving as the director of the Neuroscience and Nervous System Disorders Forum and a co-study director on the National Academy of Sciences Human Embryonic Stem Cells Research Advisory Committee.
Sarah L. Hanson is a research associate in the Board on Health Sciences Policy at the Institute of Medicine. Ms. Hanson previously worked for the Committee on Sleep Medicine and Research. She is currently the research associate for the Forum on Neuroscience and Nervous System Disorders. Prior to joining the Institute of Medicine, she served as research and program assistant at the National Research Center for Women & Families. Ms. Hanson has a B.A. from the University of Kansas with a double major in political science and international studies. She is currently taking pre-med courses at the University of Maryland and hopes to attend medical school in the future.
Amy Haas is the administrative assistant for the Board on Health Sciences Policy. She previously served as a senior project assistant for the Clinical Research Roundtable. Prior to joining IOM, she worked as a project manager for a medical education and publishing firm in Washing-
ton, DC. She graduated from Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington with a B.A. in biology.
Lora K. Taylor is a senior project assistant for the Board on Health Sciences Policy working on the Sleep Medicine and Research project. She has 14 years of experience working in the academy and prior to joining the Institute of Medicine, she served as the administrative associate for the Report Review Committee and the Division on Life Sciences' Ocean Studies Board. Ms. Taylor has a B.A. from Georgetown University with a double major in psychology and fine arts.
Vilija Teel is senior project assistant for this study, providing administrative support for the project. Ms. Teel plans and coordinates logistical arrangements for committee meetings, including coordinating travel and lodging for committee members, overseeing the attendee registration process during open sessions, and providing support throughout the committee meeting. She also provides support for the project’s financial management, including processing payment requests and ensuring timely reimbursement of travel and incidental expenses. Ms. Teel earned a B.A. in English/Linguistics from Vilnius University and has taken additional course work in finance and management areas. She is proficient in all of the major office-environment software programs. In addition to English, she has a good grasp of many other languages.