hi there.

I'm a postdoctoral researcher in the Environmental Health department at the Boston University School of Public Health. I'm working on an epidemiologic study examining contamination of Ohio River Valley drinking water by PFOA, a fluorinated organic compound. More specifically, the Geographic Patterns of Cancer Study, under Tony Fletcher (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine) and Verónica Vieira (Boston University School of Public Health), will compare cancer rates in people exposed and unexposed to PFOA in the study area.

In the Fall 2008 semester, I'll be teaching ENVS1710 Environmental Health & Policy in the Brown University Center for Environmental Studies. The course will include a grounding in environmental health methods (toxicology, epidemiology, risk assessment), the broader policy and regulatory context, and emerging problems in environmental health, with an emphasis on equity and sustainability as core values. Feel free to email me with questions about the course.

My dissertation work, with Tom Webster, explored interactions in toxicology and epidemiology, and is particularly focused on combinations of full and partial agonists. Here's a brief summary. Tom has a bit more on the subject.

In addition to interactions, I'm interested in transportation and its connections to health and sustainability. In the past few years, along with Russ Lopez, I've written and taught EH818 The Built Environment: Design Solutions for Public Health. (Russ will be taking on the teaching duties for the course in the Fall 2008 semester.) This class is part of a new effort to reunite public health and urban planning—fields that started together, and have been estranged for half a century. In Boston, the newly formed Interdisciplinary Consortium on Urban Planning and Public Health consists of academics, mostly graduate students, from a number of area schools who are interested in exploring the planning–health intersection.

Many proposed built-environment solutions for public health (e.g., walking and biking for transportation to increase physical activity and combat obesity) are at the same time solutions for sustainability (e.g., less driving). Those same solutions must be a part of any coherent mitigation strategy for slowing CO₂ increase. Making these solutions work requires careful planning on the regional, metropolitan, and neighborhood levels.

In my copious free time, I do a bit of work for the BU Superfund Program's Research Translation Core. We're developing wikis and other Web 2.0 tools for scientific research collaboration and dissemination. Also for BU Superfund, I'm working on the Health Studies Guide with Madeleine Scammell.

Finally, in the policy realm, I'm especially interested in the international trade in hazardous waste, as well as in local environmental justice and transportation advocacy.

It is possible that I am something of a bike fanatic.

You can email me at gh at bu dot edu.

Greg Howard, DSc, MPH
Boston University School of Public Health
715 Albany Steet, Talbot 4W
Boston, MA 02118