On Saturday March 15, 2008, the Toxics Action Center is hosting "Environmental Action 2008:  Mobilizing the Grassroots for a Greener New England" at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, Massachusetts. Environmental Action 2008 is New England’s largest conference for citizen activists protecting public health and the environment. The BU SBRP will be co-sponsoring this event, and Outreach Coordinator Madeleine Scammell will be co-leading a workshop with Cindy Luppi  from Clean Water Action titled "Biomonitoring: What toxics are in you? What's in your home?" from 9:30am-10:45am.

For more information or to register for the conference, please visit www.toxicsaction.org.

Ann Backus from the Harvard-NIEHS Center for Environmental Health and member of the Environmental Health Nursing Education Collaborative spoke in Professor Teresa Roberts' Health Assessment class at the University of Massachusetts Boston on March 5, 2008. Both Ann and Teresa are members of the collaborative that also includes the BU SBRP, Boston College, Mass General, and Salem State. The goal of this collaboration is to contribute to the education and training of nurses by helping their faculty integrate environmental health into the nursing curriculum.

BU SBRP Director and project 2 researcher David Ozonoff recently presented a paper at the International Conference on Formal Concept Analysis '08 in Montreal. The paper titled "Contingency Structures and Concept Analysis" has been published in the book Formal Concept Analysis. This paper describes a generalization of a common data format and data display technique in epidemiology, the contingency table, showing that it is a type of well defined mathematical structure (Boolean algebra) and that there is a sub structure of the generalized contingency table (the so-called Galois closed sets) that has the same information but is usually  dramatically reduced in size. We then show that you can extend this substructure to include background/subject knowledge, leading to ways to examine specific kinds of implications and near implications, especially relating to cause and effect. The method has been incorporated into computer software to carry out the necessary computations.

BU SBRP researcher David Waxman (project 3) recently published a review article titled "Toxicity of ethylene glycol monomethyl ether: impact on testicular gene expression" in the International Journal of Andrology. Ethylene glycol monomethyl ether (EGME) is an industrial solvent that produces methoxyacetic acid (MAA) upon biological oxidation. In this review Dr. Waxman focused on the gene and signaling pathways that are modulated by EGME exposure and their relevance to the molecular mechanisms underlying EGME and MAA testicular toxicity.