[ES_JOBS_NET] US EPA Fellowship on New Approach Methods for Calculating Ambient Chemical Inhalation Risk, North Carolina

[Pye, Havala]

Hi All,
A fellowship is available for a student (holding a MS degree) or recent graduate (MS or PhD) to investigate ambient air inhalation risk at EPA in Research Triangle Park, NC. Details are available at https://www.zintellect.com/Opportunity/Details/EPA-ORD-CCTE-CCED-2024-04.

Research Project: The EPA Center for Computational Toxicology and Exposure (CCTE) is responsible for developing new computational tools and providing quantitative analysis for improving public health and environmental risk assessments and regulatory decisions pertaining to chemical safety. In addition, the EPA Center for Environmental Measurement and Modeling (CEMMS) develops tools for prediction of ambient air quality in support of the Clean Air Act. The research participant will join a high-performing, multi-center team including modelers, programmers, wet lab scientists, and public health decision makers. The participant will be mentored by John Wambaugh and Havala Pye. The research participant will have latitude in exercising independent initiative and judgment to participate and develop additional research projects commensurate with the level of training.
Under the guidance of a mentor, the research participant will evaluate new approach methods (NAMs) for potentially assessing human health risk from air pollutants. People inhale roughly 2,000 gallons of air a day. Within that air are a myriad of emitted compounds and their oxidation products. Known pollutants are combined with ambient exposure concentrations to calculate risk at the census tract level as part of EPA's AirToxScreen. Some fraction of inhaled risk is not captured by current methods because there are known compounds in air for which we do not have routine methods to estimate risk. Further, some airborne pollutants have yet to be sufficiently characterized in terms of health effects. Over the past two decades in vitro-based NAMs have been developed for otherwise data-poor chemicals. These NAMs can help assess the potential hazard and link exposure to tissue concentrations (that is, toxicokinetics). NAMs were previously limited to chemicals amenable to in vitro testing (in particular, only semi- or non-volatile compounds). However, there have been sufficient NAM data collected to allow tools for relating chemical structure to key hazard and toxicokinetic properties. The research participant will estimate risk for understudied air pollutants by combining computational models for predicting airborne chemical concentration, mathematical models for relating inhaled concentration to human plasma levels, and structure-based models for chemical toxicity. The research participant will evaluate the usefulness of these tools for hazardous air pollutants that have no other available data.

Havala Pye and John Wambaugh

Havala Olson Taylor Pye, Ph.D.
Physical Scientist
Office of Research and Development
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Research Triangle Park, North Carolina

Email: Pye.Havala at epa.gov<mailto:Pye.Havala at epa.gov>
havalapye.wordpress.com



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mailman.ucar.edu/pipermail/es_jobs_net/attachments/20241002/72e0faef/attachment.htm>