Dr. Amy Dale joined the Advisory Board for the Stone Living Lab, a coastal resiliency/climate change research partnership between the City of Boston, UMass Boston, Boston Harbor Now, the National Parks of Boston, Massachusetts Dept. of Conservation & Recreation, and the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Foundation.
Kristina Chu was appointed to the Green New Deal Oversight Board for the City of Seattle.
Dr. Andrew Yeh and Ms. Jiaru Zhang have been certified as a Diplomate of the American Board of Toxicology.
Charlotte Marsh presenting at Material Health Open Innovation Symposium November 16. “Looking Beyond the CAS Number: Considering Form Specificity in Hazard Assessment of Metals,” will be presented from 1:40- 2:20 EST on 11/16. This work is one of four recipients of the 2021 Material Health Open Innovation Presentation Award.
Charlotte Marsh, Kim Reynolds Reid
Gradient scientists Drs. Isaac Mohar and Tom Lewandowski will present at the American College of Toxicology (ACT) 42nd Annual Meeting 2021 (Virtual). Their poster presentation is titled, “Toxicology-Based Exposure Limits for Residual HEK-293T Cell DNA and Protein.” Learn about the conference here.
The objectives of this research were: (1) determine if the World Health Organization (WHO) limit of 10 ng of residual host cell DNA per dose can be applied to the HEK-293T cell lineage and (2) identify a toxicology-based limit for residual HEK-293T cell protein.
Gradient scientists will present at the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry North America 42nd Annual Meeting 2021 (Virtual). Learn about the conference here.
Ifeoluwa A. Bamgbose will present a poster, “Microplastics in the Terrestrial Environment: Is there a real threat and risk?” The objective of this poster is to assess the weight of evidence for microplastic biological effects in soil, biota, and other terrestrial matrices.
Thomas Lewandowski (Jiaru Zhang, Joel Cohen) will give a talk, “West Coast States and Taking Different Approaches to Alternatives Assessment.” This talk will review California’s Safer Consumer Products (SCP), Oregon’s Toxic Free Kids, and Washington State’s Alternatives Assessment programs, including the key features of these three programs to understand their similarities and differences.
Charlotte Marsh (Kim Reid, Carrie Claytor) will present, “Looking Beyond the CAS Number: Considering Form Specificity in Hazard Assessment of Metals.” This talk will present technical issues related to assigning form-specific hazards and opportunities to address challenges within current assessment tools.
Jiaru Zhang, Joel Cohen, Thomas Lewandowski will present a poster, “Lessons Learned from Conducting Alternatives Analyses Under California’s Safer Consumer Products Program.” This poster will share lessons learned and key recommendations after conducting the first two Alternative Assessments submitted under California’s Safer Consumer Products (SCP) program.
Scientific Integrity at a Glance
A tripartisan group from academia, business, and government joined together to author advice on scientific integrity, including paying more attention to transparency, supporting findings by publishing underlying data, and posting detailed methods, among other things, to overcome the rising distrust in science.
In a “post-truth” world, where objective facts are becoming less influential in shaping public opinion (and policy) than appeals to emotion and personal belief, a group of industry, academic, and government scientists took it upon themselves to explore the topic of scientific integrity. Gradient scientists Mr. Mayfield and Dr. Verslycke contributed to this effort and co-authored an upcoming publication in the journal Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management, titled “Scientific Integrity Issues in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry: Improving Research Reproducibility, Credibility, and Transparency.”
The authors describe scientific integrity as a set of norms similar to those taught from a young age:
Specifically, the authors describe how scientific integrity can be harnessed by high quality environmental research that is characterized by rigor, relevance, reproducibility, and objectivity and discuss each of these in more detail in the paper. The authors conclude with a number of actions that could be taken to maintain and improve a culture of scientific integrity, such as: scientific institutions should increase attention to quality management training; scientific journals should require that all supporting data of a published study be included and strongly discourage accepting studies that lack such data; science users should be discouraged from judging science solely on the basis of its funder and should instead maintain an open-minded skepticism; and professional societies should help foster respectful evidence-based dialog during meetings and support scientific integrity training seminars.