Silent Spring Institute Staff

Julia G. Brody, PhD Executive Director Kathleen Attfield Staff Scientist Anna Batty Administrative Assistant Judith Blaine, MS Information Specialist Anne Bonner Director of Development & Community Affairs Diane Czwakiel Administrative Manager Robin E. Dodson, ScD Postdoctoral Research Fellow Sarah Dunagan, MA Research Assistant

Gwen Dwyer Administrative Assistant Cheryl Osimo Cape Coordinator Laura Perovich Research Assistant Ruthann Rudel, MS Senior Scientist, Environmental Toxicologist Laurel J. Standley, PhD Senior Scientist, Environmental Chemist Erica Truncale Development Assistant Ami Zota, ScD Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Julia G. Brody, PhD, Executive Director

Dr. Julia Brody is executive director of Silent Spring Institute and the principal investigator of the Cape Cod Breast Cancer and Environment Study, now in its tenth year. The study is investigating exposures to endocrine disruptors and mammary carcinogens from air and water pollutants and common products such as pesticides, detergents, plastics, and cosmetics. Innovative methods include testing for 89 chemicals in women’s homes and exposure mapping using a geographic information system (GIS). The study was the first to measure estrogenic activity in groundwater and drinking water. It includes 2100 Cape Cod women and has yielded 18 scientific journal articles to date, including publications in Environmental Health Perspectives; the journal of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, and Environmental Science & Technology, the most-cited journal in environmental engineering and environmental science. Collaborating investigators include researchers at Harvard, Tufts, Brown, and Boston universities, SUNY-Stony Brook, and the US Centers for Disease Control. US EPA recognized the research with an Environmental Merit Award 2000, and the study won the New Technology Award of the Environmental Business Council of New England. Brody’s ongoing work is supported by the National Cancer Institute, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, and the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, among others.

Dr. Brody is a nationally recognized leader in research on breast cancer and the environment. She presented one of the Distinguished Lectures at the National Cancer Institute in 2002 on research methods in the Cape Cod Study. She was honored by the Heroes Tribute of The Breast Cancer Fund in San Francisco and received Boston’s prestigious Social Justice Award of Wainwright Bank. She served in senior environmental policy positions at the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Management and earlier at the Texas Department of Agriculture. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin and her A.B. at Harvard University.

Kathleen Attfield, Staff Scientist

Staff Scientist Kathleen Attfield has experience in geographic information systems (GIS), urban ecology, and biochemistry. Ms. Attfield is responsible for managing the Institute’s GIS database and providing data collection and management for an ongoing study of groundwater contamination from septic systems. She will also be contributing to a review of current scientific literature on environmental pollutants and breast cancer and development of a bibliographic database.

Prior to coming to Silent Spring Institute, Ms. Attfield managed the geographic information systems database for the Urban Ecology Institute in Chestnut Hill, MA and wrote a comprehensive manual on community methods for rapid urban natural resource assessment. She has also conducted biochemical research at Boston College on developmental regulation in the African clawed frog. Ms. Attfield earned her B.Sc. with honors in biochemistry from Brown University.

Robin Dodson, ScD, Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Dr. Dodson is a postdoctoral research fellow with expertise in exposure assessment and indoor air pollution. She is currently working on developing innovative exposure assessment methods for cohort studies and intervention studies aimed at reducing indoor pollution.

Dr. Dodson recently completed her doctorate in Environmental Health at the Harvard School of Public Health. Working with Drs Deborah Bennett, Jonathan Levy, James Shine and Jack Spengler, she designed and conducted an exposure study in the Boston area focusing on residential and personal exposures to volatile organic compounds, such as chloroform from heated tap water, benzene from attached garages, and formaldehyde from home furnishings. She developed a model to evaluate the potential impacts of chemicals in secondary areas such as the basement, attached garage, and apartment hallways on residential exposure. She also developed a personal exposure model based on time-weighted microenvironmental concentrations to determine how people are exposed to volatile organic compounds and, in addition, she evaluated methods for leveraging existing residential concentration data to model residential concentrations for potential study populations. As a graduate student, she also contributed to two studies focusing on asthma in lower socioeconomic status urban residences in the Boston area.

Prior to her graduate work, Dr. Dodson worked at Menzie-Cura and Associates where she contributed to both human and ecological risk assessments and the development of environmental health educational materials under an NIH grant. She has a B.S. in Environmental Studies from Bates College, Lewiston, Maine, where she was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa Academic Honor Society, and a M.S. in Environmental Science and Risk Management from Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts.

Cheryl Osimo, Cape Coordinator

As Cape Coordinator, Ms. Osimo organizes the education and outreach efforts of the Institute, including conducting information sessions for Cape residents and organizations, convening public advisory committee meetings and other public forums, serving as liaison to media and local officials, and organizing programs and activities that support the Institute's research agenda. Ms. Osimo is also an active member of several community-based health advocacy organizations such as the Massachusetts Breast Cancer Coalition, for which she serves on the Board of Directors; the Breast Cancer Advisory Committee for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health; the Cape Cod Hospital Multidisciplinary Quality Improvement Breast Cancer Team; and the Concerned Parents for Safe Food group, for which she is a founding member.

Her community outreach to Cape residents on health care issues has been honored by several civic and community groups including Boston University, Arthur H. Wilde Award for Distinguished Service to Community, the Massachusetts Federation of Business and Professional Women, the National Women's Health Network, Community Service Award-Local Community, and the State Senate of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Official Citation in Recognition for being named Woman of the Year and for Commitment to Women's Health. She was selected to participate as a presenter and as a mentor for a first time reviewer in the 2005 Breast Cancer Research Program peer review meeting that is sponsored by the Department of Defense, United States Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs. Ms. Osimo earned her B.S. in elementary education at Boston University.

Ruthann Rudel, Senior Scientist, Environmental Toxicologist

Ms. Rudel is the senior scientist in environmental toxicology with experience in toxicology, risk assessment, exposure assessment, and environmental project management. One of Ms. Rudel's areas of research is the potential health effects of chemicals that affect the endocrine system. She oversees the environmental assessment portion of the Cape Cod Breast Cancer and Environment Study, a multidisciplinary research effort funded by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health to study elevated breast cancer incidence on Cape Cod. As part of the Cape Cod Study, she has designed and directed exposure monitoring projects to characterize exposure to endocrine disruptors and animal mammary carcinogens in air, household dust, water, and wastewater.

Before joining Silent Spring Institute, she spent five years at Gradient Corporation, an environmental consulting firm. There she managed a variety of risk assessment projects and conducted research in regulatory toxicology, including the study of structure-activity relationships of PCBs; genotoxicity and dose-response relationships for arsenic, lead neurotoxicity, and exposure assessment; and international methods for conducting dose-response evaluations. Prior to working at Gradient, she was involved in research at the Neuroscience Department of Tufts University Medical School. She has published journal articles and book chapters on exposure and risk assessment for endocrine disruptors, regulatory toxicology, metals risk assessment, indoor-air assessment, and other topics. She has a B.A. in Chemistry and Neuroscience from Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, and an M.S. in Environmental Management and Policy from Tufts University in Boston.

Laurel J. Standley, PhD, Senior Scientist, Environmental Chemist

Dr. Standley is the senior scientist in environmental chemistry with expertise in tracking the sources and fate of toxic substances in air, water, and biological systems. A key focus of her research is determining exposures of people and ecosystems to endocrine disrupting compounds in wastewater-contaminated groundwater. Dr. Standley also collaborates on other exposure studies, such as those involving air pollution and household products.

Before joining Silent Spring Institute, Dr. Standley conducted research at the Stroud Water Research Center tracking sources of contaminants to rivers and investigating the chemical and biological pathways that controlled uptake of toxic compounds by aquatic plants and animals. She also investigated the maternal transfer of pesticides in the larval mayfly. For the year preceding her arrival at Silent Spring Institute, she was an independent consultant providing technical assistance to nonprofit environmental organizations. Dr. Standley has a B.Sc. in Chemistry from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, a Ph.D. in Marine Chemistry from Oregon State University, and a M.A. in Urban Affairs and Public Policy from the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Delaware.

Ami Zota, ScD, Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Dr. Zota is a postdoctoral research fellow with expertise in exposure assessment, source apportionment air pollution modeling, environmental epidemiology, and community-based research methods. She is currently working on the Breast Cancer and Environmental Justice Project to understand sources and exposure pathways of outdoor and indoor air pollutants in a fence-line environmental justice community.

Dr. Zota recently completed her doctorate in Environmental Health at the Harvard School of Public Health under the direction of Dr. Jack Spengler. As part of her doctoral dissertation, she designed and implemented a multi-media exposure assessment at the Tar Creek Superfund site in rural Oklahoma, an area inhabited by people of Native American descent, to determine how pregnant women and young children are being exposed to mining-related metal pollutants. She also used innovative GIS-based spatial models to determine exposure ‘hot-spots’ and received an award for this work at the 2006 International Society for Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE) Conference.

Dr. Zota has a strong commitment to socially-responsible research and has worked on community-based participatory research projects for the last 10 years. Ami is also a former Schweitzer and Environmental Leadership Program (ELP) Fellow. She received a BSPH in Environmental Science & Engineering from University of North Carolina School of Public Health in Chapel Hill, NC, and a ScD in Environmental Health from Harvard University’s School of Public Health.