Appendix B
Committee and Staff Biographies
COMMITTEE BIOGRAPHIES
Irva Hertz-Picciotto, Ph.D., M.P.H., M.A. (Chair), is a professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences in the School of Medicine and also at the Medical Investigations of Neurodevelopmental Disorders (MIND) Institute, University of California, Davis (UC Davis), and she is the chief of the Division of Environmental and Occupational Health. She is also the deputy director of the Center for Children’s Environmental Health at UC Davis and the director of the Northern California Center for the National Children’s Study. She has published widely on environmental exposures, including metals, pesticides, polychlorinated biphenyls, and air pollution and on their effects on pregnancy, the neonate, and early child development as well as on methods in epidemiologic research. She has also led several cohort studies of toxic chemicals and both pregnancy outcomes and early child development in Chile, eastern Europe, and Mexico. Recently she co-founded Project TENDR (Targeting Environment and Neuro-Developmental Risks), a collaborative effort of scientists, clinicians, policy makers, and advocates that aims to decrease the incidence of neurodevelopmental disorders by reducing the neurotoxicant exposures that contribute to them. Dr. Hertz-Picciotto has served on scientific advisory panels for the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) National Toxicology Program, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the NIH Interagency Coordinating Committee on Autism Research, and the California Governor’s Proposition 65 committee. She has served or currently sits on the editorial boards for the American Journal of Epidemiology, Environmental Health Perspectives, Epidemiology, and Autism Research. She served as the president of the Society for Epidemiologic
Research and of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology, and in 2011 she received the Goldsmith Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology. Dr. Hertz-Picciotto has previously chaired three National Academies’ committees: one on breast cancer and the environment and two previous updates of Committees to Review the Health Effects in Vietnam Veterans of Exposure to Herbicides. She received a Ph.D. and an M.P.H. in epidemiology and an M.A. in biostatistics from UC Berkeley. Before joining the faculty at UC Davis, Dr. Hertz-Picciotto was a professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the School of Public Health at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a National Associate of the National Academies.
Nancy Berliner, M.D., is the chief of the Division of Hematology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School. Her research focus is gene regulatory pathways of normal white blood cell development and how they are disrupted in leukemia and pre-leukemic syndromes as well as the pathogenesis of the anemia of aging and benign and malignant hematologic disorders. Most recently, her laboratory has studied the role of cellular stress responses in the disruption of hematopoietic cell differentiation in myelodysplasia. A second focus of her laboratory is the role of inflammatory cytokines in the anemia of the elderly and in modulating the natural history of myelodysplasia. Dr. Berliner is a member of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM; elected 2010). She received her M.D. from the Yale University School of Medicine.
Wendy B. Bernstein, M.D., is a staff physician in the Department of Hematology Oncology at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and an associate professor of medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS). Prior assignments included chairing the central scientific review committee at Walter Reed and serving as a staff clinician at the National Cancer Institute’s Medical Oncology Branch. Her clinical interests include malignancies in immune-compromised hosts, and her research activities involve immune reconstitution in HIV-infected persons using CAR-T cells. Dr. Bernstein is a 28-year veteran of the Army Medical Corps, having retired with the rank of colonel. She received her M.D. from USUHS and is board certified in internal medicine, oncology, and hematology.
Michael J. Carvan III, Ph.D., M.S., is a Shaw Professor at the School of Freshwater Sciences and School of Public Health, both of the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He earned his M.S. in biologic oceanography at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science in Coral Gables and his Ph.D. in veterinary anatomy and public health with a focus in toxicology from Texas A&M University’s College of Veterinary Medicine in College Station. After obtaining his doctorate, Dr. Carvan held National Institute of Environmental
Health Sciences molecular toxicology fellowships at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center. His research uses zebrafish as a genetic system for identifying genes that influence the susceptibility of response to xenobiotics. He has served on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Board on Life Sciences and as a committee member on the ninth and tenth updates of Committees to Review the Health Effects in Vietnam Veterans of Exposure to Herbicides.
Aravinda Chakravarti, Ph.D., is a professor of medicine and neuroscience at the New York University School of Medicine and the director of the Center for Human Genetics and Genomics. He has been a key participant and architect of the Human Genome, HapMap, and 1000 Genomes projects. His research focus is the genome-scale analysis of humans and the computational analysis of gene variation and function to understand the molecular genetic basis of complex human phenotypes, particularly disease. Dr. Chakravarti’s discovery of genes and pathways contributing to Hirschsprung disease has served as a model for the genetic dissection of other multifactorial human disorders, such as autism spectrum disorders, hypertension, and sudden cardiac death. He was president of the American Society of Human Genetics in 2008 and received its William Allan Award in 2013. He is one of the founding editors-in-chief of Genome Research and the Annual Reviews of Genomics and Human Genetics, and has served and serves on the boards of numerous international journals, academic societies, the National Institutes of Health, and biotechnology companies. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (elected 2015) and the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) (elected 2007). Dr. Chakravarti is also an honorary fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences. Currently he serves on the NAM Council nominating committee. He received his Ph.D. in human genetics from the University of Texas–Houston Health Science Center.
Dana C. Dolinoy, Ph.D., is the NSF International Chair of Environmental Health Sciences and a professor of environmental health sciences and nutritional sciences at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, and she leads the Environmental Epigenetics and Nutrition Laboratory, which investigates how nutritional and environmental factors interact with epigenetic gene regulation to shape health and disease. She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry and Epigenetics and is an associate editor for Environmental Health Perspectives, Environmental Epigenetics, and Toxicological Sciences. She is an active member of the Society of Toxicology, the Environmental Mutagen and Genomics Society, and the American Society for Nutrition, and she served as the chair of the 2015 Gordon Research Conference in Molecular and Cellular Mechanisms of Toxicity. In 2011 Dr. Dolinoy received the Norman Kretchmer Memorial Award from the American Society for Nutrition and the Classic Paper of the Year Award from Environmental Health Perspectives
for Dolinoy et al. “Maternal genistein alters coat color and protects Avy mouse offspring from obesity by modifying the fetal epigenome.” In 2012 she was the recipient of the Association of Schools of Public Health/Pfizer Research Award for the article, “An expression microarray approach for the identification of metastable epialleles in the mouse genome.” This work was cited as a model approach that may allow for directly assessing the role of early nutritional and environmental exposures in human adult disease. Dr. Dolinoy recently received the 2015 National Institutes of Health Director’s Transformative Research Award to develop novel epigenome editing tools to reduce disease risk, and in 2016 served as the chair of the Society of Toxicology’s Contemporary Concepts in Toxicology meeting, ToxicoEpigenetics: The Interface of Epigenetics and Risk Assessment. Dr. Dolinoy holds an M.Sc. in environmental sciences and engineering from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a Ph.D. in genetics and genomics and integrated toxicology from Duke University.
Mary A. Fox, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management and the co-director of the Risk Sciences and Public Policy Institute at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She teaches courses in quantitative risk assessment methods and risk policy and management for the Risk Sciences and Public Policy Institute’s Certificate Program. Dr. Fox’s research is focused on human health risk assessment as a part of environmental policy making, particularly approaches to cumulative and chemical mixtures risk assessment. Dr. Fox has served on three National Academies’ committees: Gulf War and Health, Volume 10: Update of Health Effects of Serving in the Gulf War, Long-Term Health Consequences of Exposure to Burn Pits in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Health Risks of Phthalates. Dr. Fox began her public health career conducting community health studies around hazardous waste sites as a research scientist in the New York State Department of Health. Dr. Fox received her M.P.H. from the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry and a Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Karl T. Kelsey, M.D., M.O.H., is a professor of epidemiology, pathology, and laboratory medicine at Brown University. Dr. Kelsey received his M.D. from the University of Minnesota and a master’s degree in occupational health from Harvard University. Until 2007 he was on the faculty of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School. He is interested in the application of laboratory-based biomarkers in chronic-disease epidemiology and tumor biology and in characterizing individual susceptibility to cancer. He is an author of more than 200 publications and has served on the National Academies’ Committees on Toxicity Testing and Assessment of Environmental Agents, on Copper in Drinking Water, on the Evaluation of the Department of Veterans Affairs Uniform Case Assessment Protocol to Review the Health Consequences of Service During the Persian Gulf War, on Curriculum Development
in Environmental Medicine, on the Health Effects of Mustard Gas and Lewisite, and, most recently, on the past three Committees to Review the Health Effects in Vietnam Veterans of Exposure to Herbicides.
Molly L. Kile, Sc.D. is an associate professor in the College of Public Health and Human Sciences at Oregon State University and the director of its Environmental Exposure and Biomarker Lab, and she coordinates the program in environmental and occupational health. She has affiliations with the university’s Center for Global Health and is a visiting scholar in the Department of Environmental Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She also leads the Community Engagement Core of Oregon State University’s Superfund Basic Research Program, which works in collaboration with Native American tribes in the Pacific Northwest to investigate their environmental health concerns and is funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences on a research project examining the potential for developmental exposures to influence immune functioning in children. Dr. Kile’s primary research interest is in environmental and molecular epidemiology. Her research has focused on the application of biological markers for studying exposures and the interaction between host factors (genetic polymorphisms, nutritional status, microbiome, and epigenetic markers) and environmental exposures. She serves as an editor for the Journal of Environmental and Public Health. Dr. Kile received her Ph.D. from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in environmental health and continued her postdoctoral training at Harvard in molecular epidemiology.
Andrew F. Olshan, Ph.D., is the Barbara Sorenson Hulka Distinguished Professor in the Department of Epidemiology of the University of North Carolina (UNC) Gillings School of Global Public Health. He is also the associate director of population sciences at the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. His research interests are the etiology of cancer and reproductive, perinatal, and pediatric outcomes. Recent work has focused on the role of environmental exposures, genetic factors, and adverse health effects in children and adults. He directs the National Institutes of Health–funded studies of head and neck cancer, breast cancer, and childhood cancer. He is director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention–funded North Carolina Center for Birth Defects Research and Prevention. He has served on several National Academies’ committees, most recently as co-chair of the Committee to Review the Draft IRIS Assessment on Formaldehyde. He has also served as a member on four prior committees to review health effects in Vietnam veterans exposed to Agent Orange and other herbicides. Dr. Olshan received both his M.S. and Ph.D. in epidemiology from the University of Washington and was a postdoctoral fellow in medical genetics at the University of British Columbia.
Beate R. Ritz, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H, is a professor in and the former chair of the Epidemiology Department at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she has been a faculty member since 1995. Dr. Ritz holds co-appointments in both the environmental health department at the UCLA School of Public Health and in neurology at the UCLA School of Medicine. She received both her M.D. and Ph.D. in medical sociology from the University of Hamburg, Germany, in 1987. Dr. Ritz was a research fellow and served her residency at the Psychiatric University Hospital in Hamburg. She went on to receive her doctoral training and a Ph.D. in epidemiology in 1995 from UCLA. Dr. Ritz’s research has focused on environmental toxins and the health effects they may have on birth outcomes, neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders, cancers, and chronic diseases. For the past two decades, she has conducted research on the effects of air pollution on adverse birth outcomes and neurodevelopmental disorders in children who live in Southern California. She also studied the long-term effects of pesticides exposure on Parkinson disease and cancer and is working on establishing a Parkinson disease registry in California. Dr. Ritz previously served on National Academies’ committees including two committees responsible for Gulf War and Health series reports, on the Committee on the Review of the Scientific Literature on Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis in Veterans, and, most recently, Using 21st Century Science to Improve Risk-Related Evaluations.
Lori A. White, Ph.D., M.S., is an associate professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology of the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She received a master’s degree in zoology from the University of Maine, earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the Dartmouth Medical School, and did postdoctoral work at the University of Wisconsin. She has been active in Gordon Research Conference programs and was the chairperson for the Mechanisms of Toxicology summer session in 2008. Her past research focused on the elucidation of dioxin’s carcinogenic activity, specifically how TCDD activates the aryl hydrocarbon receptor pathway resulting in altered gene expression in different biologically relevant targets. In addition to this project, her laboratory currently uses the zebrafish model to study the neurotoxicological and behavioral effects following exposure to environmental contaminants during development. She served on the ninth and tenth biennial updates of the Committees to Review the Health Effects in Vietnam Veterans of Exposure to Herbicides.
STAFF BIOGRAPHIES
David A. Butler, Ph.D., is a scholar in and the director of the Office of Military and Veterans Health in the Health and Medicine Division of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. He earned his B.S. and M.S.
degrees in engineering from the University of Rochester and his doctoral degree in public policy analysis from Carnegie Mellon University. Before joining the National Academies, Dr. Butler served as an analyst for the U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment, was a research associate in the Department of Environmental Health of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and conducted research at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He has directed several National Academies studies on military and veterans health, environmental health, and risk assessment topics, including ones that produced Research on the Health Effects of Low-Level Ionizing Radiation: Opportunities for the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute; Future Uses of the DoD Joint Pathology Center Biorepository; Provision of Mental Health Counseling Services Under TRICARE; PTSD Compensation and Military Service; Veterans and Agent Orange: Update 1998 and Update 2000; Disposition of the Air Force Health Study; and the report series Characterizing the Exposure of Veterans to Agent Orange and Other Herbicides Used in Vietnam. Dr. Butler was also a co-editor of Systems Engineering to Improve Traumatic Brain Injury Care in the Military Health System.
Anne N. Styka, M.P.H., is a senior program officer in the Health and Medicine Division of the National Academies. Over her tenure she has worked on more than 10 studies on a broad range of topics related to the health of military and veteran populations. Studies have included mental health treatment offered in the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA); designing and evaluating epidemiological research studies using VA data for health outcomes related to deployment-related exposures, including burn pits and chemicals; and directing a research program of fostering new research studies using data and biospecimens collected as part of the 20-year Air Force Health Study. Before coming to the National Academies, Ms. Styka spent several years working as an epidemiologist for the New Mexico Department of Health and the Albuquerque Area Southwest Tribal Epidemiology Center, and she spent several months in Zambia as the epidemiologist on a study of silicosis and other nonmalignant respiratory diseases among copper miners. She has several peer-reviewed publications and has contributed to numerous state and national reports. She received her B.S. in cell and tissue bioengineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago and has an M.P.H. in epidemiology from the University of Michigan. Ms. Styka was the 2017 recipient of the Division of Earth and Life Sciences Mt. Everest Award, the 2015 recipient of the Institute of Medicine and National Academy of Medicine Multitasker Award, and a member of the 2011 National Academies’ Distinguished Group Award.
T. Cheri Banks, M.P.H., is a research associate in the Health and Medicine Division of the National Academies. Originally from Atlanta, Georgia, Ms. Banks spent time working at Emory University in the Office for Clinical Research and the
Office of Grants and Contracts Accounting, where she managed all grants-related issues, wrote for the Emory research newsletter, and conducted proposal training courses. Ms. Banks also spent time working with the Georgia Department of Health (GDPH) in Atlanta on the DPH13-1305 cooperative agreement funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In her role with GDPH, Ms. Banks analyzed wellness policies for schools in various counties within Georgia and made recommendations for each county to improve their policy. She received her B.A. in psychology from Oglethorpe University and has an M.P.H. in prevention science from the Rollins School of Public Health–Emory University in Atlanta.
Elizabeth Barksdale Boyle, M.P.H., CIH, has more than 15 years of experience in environmental health and epidemiology. She is a program officer within the Division on Earth and Life Studies of the National Academies. Formerly, she was an environmental health scientist at Westat, where she supported the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institute of Child Health and Development, and the National Cancer Institute by completing other environmental epidemiology–related projects. Prior to her tenure at Westat, Ms. Boyle was a student epidemiologist at the Minnesota Department of Health and an industrial hygienist at a consulting firm in Cincinnati. She serves as the chair of the nominations committee for the International Society of Exposure Science. She is also a fellow of the Bloomberg American Health Initiative at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she is pursuing a doctorate of public health in environmental health.
Pamela Ramey-McCray, is an administrative assistant in the Health and Medicine Division. She has worked to support numerous studies on military and veterans health, malaria research, and U.S. veteran twins since coming to the National Academies in 1993. Ms. Ramey-McCray is a recipient of the Institute of Medicine’s 2009 Veteran Award. She earned her bachelor’s degree in human relations at Trinity Washington University in Washington, DC. Before coming to the National Academies, Ms. Ramey-McCray worked for the American Psychological Society and the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
