Focus area: Environmental Risk Assessment

Environmental Risk Assessment provides opportunities for students to specialize in one or more aspects of risk assessment, or to apply their other studies to risk assessment. All aspects of risk assessment are examined with a common theme being development and use of advanced scientific information in understanding environmental risks and assisting decision-makers in the design of strategies to mitigate risk. Within this broad scope, ESE has strong expertise in two areas from which students might select if they wish to specialize further:

    * Exposure Assessment, including measurements and modeling of

      exposure conditions, development of biomarkers of exposure,

      characterization of inter-subject variability and uncertainty in

      exposure estimates.

    * Exposure-Response Assessment, including development of

     biologically-based dose-response relationships, understanding of

      pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic processes, and a development

      of assay methods.

Students in the Department might choose to focus their studies broadly on environmental risk assessment, might focus on one of the two aspects above, might take part of the sequence of risk assessment courses to supplement their studies in other areas, and/or might select a research topic within risk assessment.

Environmental Risk Assessment courses may be combined flexibly to allow specialization.

Curriculum

All students should take ENVR 175 (Environmental Risk Assessment), which has as prerequisites ENVR 110 (Environmental Chemistry Processes) and ENVR 131 (Health Effects of Environmental Agents). This course provides an overview of the issues, methods and applications of risk assessment. All students also should take EPID 160 (Principles of Epidemiology) or EPID 168 (Fundamentals of Epidemiology) and a course equivalent to BIOS 135 (Probability and Statistics).

Students then select from a wide range of more advanced (200-level) courses:

ENVR 161 Geostatistics for Spatial/Temporal Environmental Phenomena

ENVR 162 Random Field Modeling of Environmental Processes

ENVR 276 Advanced Methods of Exposure Assessment

ENVR 277 Stochastic Environmental Health Modeling

ENVR 278 Knowledge Processing in Uncertain Environments

ENVR 265 Multiphase Transport Phenomena

ENVR 232 Health Effects of Outdoor and Indoor Air Pollution

ENVR 230 Principles of Chemical Carcinogenesis

ENVR 292 Theory and Practice of Exposure Evaluation

ENVR 231 Advanced Toxicology

ENVR 233 Biological Monitoring and Exposure Assessment