People

Elaine M. Faustman, PhD
Center Co-Director and Human Exposure Research Project Director
faustman@u.washington.edu

Dr. Faustman is a Professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences (DEOHS) and Director of the Institute for Risk Analysis and Risk Communication. She is also Director of the National Institute for Environmental Health Science (NIEHS)/Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Center for Child Environmental Health Risks Research. Dr. Faustman is an elected fellow of the Society of Toxicology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has served on the National Toxicology Program Board of Scientific Counselors, the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Toxicology, and numerous editorial boards. She currently chairs the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Developmental Toxicology. Her research interests include understanding mechanisms of developmental and reproductive toxicants, characterizing in vitro techniques for developmental toxicology assessment, development of biologically based dose-response models for noncancer risk assessment, and development of decision-analytic tools for incorporating new scientific findings into risk assessment and risk management decisions.

E. Virginia Armbrust, PhD
Center Co-Director and Toxic Algae Research Project Director
armbrust@ocean.washington.edu

Dr. Armbrust is a Professor in the School of Oceanography and a biological oceanographer interested in phytoplankton biodiversity and the response of these organisms to environmental change. Her main research focus is on diatoms, with a particular interest in projects that use genomic/molecular approaches to understand both the onset and diversity of in toxicity of Pseudo-nitzschia. She is currently involved in the ECOHAB (Ecology and Oceanography of Harmful Algal Blooms) project working to identify what genes are turned on when Pseudo-nitzschia becomes toxic. She is also the head of the ongoing diatom whole genome sequencing project funded by the US Department of Energy. She participated in the National Institute for Environmental Health Science (NIEHS)/National Science Foundation (NSF) roundtable on oceans and human health and served on a committee to facilitate collaborations on HAB research between the European Union and NSF.

Thomas Burbacher, PhD
Neurobehavioral Assessment Facility Core Director
tmb@u.washington.edu

Dr. Burbacher is an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences. He also directs the Neurobehavioral Facility Core for the Center for Child Environmental Health Risks Research and is Director of the Community Outreach and Education Program for the NIEHS Center for Ecogenetics and Environmental Health. His research aims to determine the effects of prenatal and early postnatal exposure to common environmental pollutants on the physical and behavioral development of children.

Lucio G. Costa, PhD
Mechanisms of Toxicity Research Project Director
lgcosta@u.washington.edu

Dr. Costa is a Professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences’ toxicology program. Research in his laboratory addresses two general areas - mechanisms of developmental neurotoxicity and genetic susceptibility to neurotoxicants and neurodegenerative diseases. Dr. Costa is also a contributor to the Center for Child Environmental Health Risks Research, the Center for Ecogenetics and Environmental Health, the Superfund Research Project and the Toxicogenomics Consortium.

Allan Devol, PhD
Environment Facility Core Director
devol@u.washington.edu

Dr. Devol is a Research Professor in the School of Oceanography and a chemical oceanographer with research interests in marine and freshwater biogeochemistry, including carbon fluxes, biochemical analysis of biological rate processes, and interdependence of chemical, biological and physical processes in the control of observed distributions in oceans, lakes and rivers.

Clement Furlong, PhD
Biosensors Facility Core Director
clem@u.washington.edu

Dr. Furlong is a Research Professor in the School of Medicine’s Department of Medical Genetics and has been carrying out research on biosensors for more than 15 years.  His original interests in this area stem from his interests in microbial receptor proteins that serve as receptors for chemotaxis. More recently, Dr. Furlong has been working closely with his colleague Dr. Sinclair Yee and his research team in the Department of Electrical Engineering at UW and colleagues at Texas Instruments (TI) to develop inexpensive, miniaturized biosensors based on the TI miniaturized surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensor module. Dr. Furlong has a number of publications in the biosensor area and three issued patents.

William Griffith, PhD
Informatics Facility Core Director
griffith@u.washington.edu

Dr. Griffith is the Director of the Risk Assessment Core of the Institute for Risk Analysis and Risk Communication in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences. Dr. Griffith was trained as a biostatistician and is a member of the National Council on Radiation Protection’s committees on Interspecies Extrapolation, Uncertainties in Metabolic Models, and Radiation Dose Response for the Lung. He has received the Society of Toxicology's Frank R. Blood Award for the paper of the year and two Inhalation Specialty Section awards for paper of the year.

Charles A. (“Si”) Simenstad, MS
Shellfish Kinetics Research Project Director
simenstd@u.washington.edu

Mr. Simenstad is a Research Associate Professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. He is an estuarine and coastal marine ecologist and Coordinator of the Wetland Ecosystem Team. Mr. Simenstad has studied estuarine and coastal marine ecosystems throughout Puget Sound, the Washington coast, and Alaska for over thirty years. Recent research has integrated ecosystem dynamics with applied issues such as restoration, creation and enhancement of estuarine and coastal wetland ecosystems, and ecological approaches to evaluating the success of coastal wetland restoration at ecosystem and landscape scales.