From Superfund remediation sites near neighborhoods to wartime combat zones, toxicology is everywhere, which is why many states employ toxicologists on their public health teams. Co-hosts Anne Chappelle, PhD, and David Faulkner, PhD, speak with Julie Miller, PhD, Public Health Toxicologist for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, about the impacts of stress and environmental exposures on public health.

About the Guest
Julie Miller, PhD, Public Health Toxicologist, Pennsylvania Department of Public Health, is a board-certified toxicologist with primary training and expertise in analytical chemistry, in vitro and alternative methods, toxicology study design, data analysis and interpretation, and mixtures toxicology. Dr. Miller has significant experience supporting regulatory submissions of consumer products for toxicological, analytical chemistry, and human health risk assessment and has demonstrated expertise in review and derivation of occupational exposure limits (OELs) and permissible exposure limits (PELs) for various industries, exposure assessment for consumer products, and analytical method development and analysis for quantification of tire particles in environmental matrices. Dr. Miller has also managed occupational health and safety projects related to employee stress, sleep deprivation, and traumatic injury in the workplace.

Dr. Miller received her PhD from the Department of Chemistry at West Virginia University, where her dissertation utilized early cellular changes to explore biological responses to individual chemical and mixture exposures. Dr. Miller received postdoctoral training at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (CDC/NIOSH), where she evaluated neurobiochemical alterations in vivo after exposure to a mixture of stress and occupational and/or environmental chemical insult to further elucidate the role stress plays in physiological response to external stimuli.

Dr. Miller has over 50 published manuscripts, abstracts, and book chapters related to in vitro and in vivo toxicology.

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Did you know that there are scientists who study teamwork? Co-hosts Anne Chappelle, PhD, and David Faulkner, PhD, DABT, speak with Stephen Fiore, PhD, Director, Cognitive Sciences Laboratory, about the art and science of working in teams and what you can do to improve teamwork in your lab, department, etc.

About the Guest
Stephen M. Fiore, PhD, is Director, Cognitive Sciences Laboratory, and Professor with the University of Central Florida's Cognitive Sciences Program in the Department of Philosophy and School of Modeling, Simulation, and Training. He maintains a multidisciplinary research interest that incorporates aspects of the cognitive, social, organizational, and computational sciences in the investigation of learning and performance in individuals and teams. His primary area of research is the interdisciplinary study of complex collaborative cognition and the understanding of how humans interact socially and with technology.

Dr. Fiore is Immediate Past President of the International Network for the Science of Team Science, and Past President for the Interdisciplinary Network for Group Research. In 2018, Dr. Fiore was nominated to DARPA's Information Sciences and Technology (ISAT) Study Group to help the Department of Defense examine future areas of technological development potentially influencing national security. He has been a visiting scholar for the study of shared and extended cognition at École Normale Supérieure de Lyon in Lyon, France (2010), and an invited visitor to the internationally renowned interdisciplinary Santa Fe Institute (2013). He was a member of the expert panel for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which focused on collaborative problem-solving skills. He has contributed to working groups for the National Academies of Sciences in understanding and measuring "21st-Century Skills" and was a committee member of their "Science of Team Science" consensus study, as well as a member of the National Assessment of Educational Progress report on "Collaborative Problem Solving".

Dr. Fiore has been awarded the University of Central Florida (UCF) prestigious Research Incentive Award four times to acknowledge his significant accomplishments, and he is recipient of UCF's Luminary Award (2019), as recognition for his work having a significant impact on the world, and UCF's Reach for the Stars Award (2014), as recognition for bringing international prominence to the university.

As Principal Investigator and Co-Principal Investigator, Dr. Fiore has helped to secure and manage approximately $35 million in research funding. He is co-author of a book on “Accelerating Expertise” (2013) and is a co-editor of volumes on Shared Cognition (2012), Macrocognition in Teams (2008), Distributed Training (2007), and Team Cognition (2004). Dr. Fiore has also co-authored over 200 scholarly publications in the area of learning, memory, and problem solving in individuals and groups.

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Fish on treadmills? Lisa Truong, PhD, MBA, Oregon State University, discusses the unique ways that they test exposure effects using zebrafish. Co-hosts Anne Chappelle, PhD, and David Faulkner, PhD, also ask her about the benefits of having an MBA as a scientist.

About the Guest
The overall goal of Lisa Truong's research program is to utilize the zebrafish model to help build computational predictive toxicity models. Secondarily, she aims to move the field to be less reliant on animal testing and to conduct toxicity-testing based on toxicity pathways.

Dr. Truong has a Bachelor’s degree in pre-pharmacy with a minor in chemistry, which provided the foundation to evaluate a structurally diverse class of fluorinated compounds during her Master's studies. Her PhD thesis was focused on developing rapid in vivo assays to investigate structure response relationships using larval and adult zebrafish. Using the methods that Dr. Truong developed, the zebrafish developmental toxicity screen is now fully automated at the Sinnhuber Aquatic Research Laboratory (SARL).

During Dr. Truong's postdoctoral training at the US Environmental Protection Agency, she developed systemic toxicity models while working within the then-National Center for Computational Toxicology and L’Oreal. She built numerous models using the high-throughput data generated from over 800 assays and became adept at programming in R and in advanced statistics.

More recently, since her recruitment as the Deputy Director of the SARL, Dr. Truong has begun to build robust statistical methods to integrate multi-dimensional phenotypic and expression zebrafish data and has helped to streamline data collection which has further increased the throughput which is critical for this proposal.

In summary, for nearly a decade, Dr. Truong has developed advanced zebrafish as a premier model for environmental health sciences research. The research is now at a point to begin mining the data to develop models to prioritize and predict toxicity of chemicals/nanoparticles/mixtures that have insufficient hazard information.

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