Speaker: Uni Blake
Description: The environmental justice (EJ) movement arose from community concerns surrounding how people of color and/or low-socioeconomic status have borne the disproportionate impacts of environmental hazards, contributing to disease and health disparities. Risk assessors, risk modelers, and regulatory analysts are tasked with addressing these concerns and finding solutions to address environmental injustice. This workshop explores how the regulators, the scientific community, and the regulated community navigate the complex EJ landscape.
Speaker: Kan Shao
Description: This full-day workshop will begin with an introduction on the benchmark dose modeling in a Bayesian framework and then provide participants with hands-on experience of using the Bayesian Benchmark Dose modeling (BBMD) system to perform dose-response assessment using toxicological and epidemiological data. The workshop will cover a number of important topics in Bayesian BMD modeling, including using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to fit dose-response models, using appropriate statistics to evaluate goodness of fit, estimating the distributions of model parameters and quantities of interest (e.g., BMD), calculating model averaged BMD estimates to take model uncertainty into account, and employing the Monte Carlo simulation for probabilistic low-dose extrapolation, etc. More importantly, the workshop will extensively explore the major functionalities of the BBMD system for dose-response assessment through case studies: (1) for toxicological data, BMD analysis of single and multiple datasets for dichotomous, continuous, and categorical data will be discussed and practiced; (2) for epidemiological data, BMD modeling with quantification for exposure uncertainty will be explored. In short, the workshop will provide participants with both theoretical and practical skills of using the BBMD system for dose-response assessment.