5th SETAC World Congress
3 - 7 August 2008
Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre, Sydney Australia
Protecting our Global Environment

Anne Fairbrother

Anne Fairbrother, DVM, PhD, a former SETAC President (2002–2003), is a senior consultant who heads the Environmental Risk and Toxicology practice at Parametrix. She provides services in ecological risk assessment and ecotoxicology, with an emphasis on terrestrial systems. Anne works in the areas of contaminated site assessment, pesticide regulatory science and similar needs of the chemical and metals industries.

During her 22 year career, Anne also served as Associate Director for Science and Chief of the Ecotoxicology Branch at the USEPA Western Ecology Division and as a Senior Ecotoxicologist in private consulting. At the USEPA she led the development of research into the ecological risks of bioengineered crops and of methods for assessing risks of nanomaterials. She also supported the USEPA and other state or national agencies through development of guidance documents e.g., for metals risk assessments and through technical support for site-specific soil and water criteria development for wildlife protection

Her primary areas of expertise are in sublethal effects of chemicals on wildlife, particularly immunotoxicants and endocrine disruptors. She has been the recipient of several honors and awards from professional societies, and holds courtesy appointments on faculties of Environmental Toxicology and Veterinary Medicine Departments. She has authored more than 75 scientific papers and has delivered over 100 seminars, workshops, or other technical presentations. She is on the Editorial Boards of several international journals, and has served in leadership positions in the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC), the Wildlife Disease Association (WDA), and the American Association of Wildlife Veterinarians (AAWV).

Tony Haymet

Tony Haymet is director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. He also serves as UC San Diego’s vice chancellor for marine sciences and dean of the Graduate School of Marine Sciences, and is a professor of oceanography at Scripps.  He was previously Chief of Marine and Atmospheric Research, then Director of Science and Policy, at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). He is a highly distinguished chemist whose research has focused on freezing, phase transitions, nucleation, and Antarctic fish antifreeze proteins.

Born and educated in Sydney, Australia, he has a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Chicago, and a D.Sc. from the University of Sydney.  He had positions at Harvard University, UC Berkeley and the University of Utah.  He returned to Australia in 1991 as professor and Established Chair of Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Sydney.  In 1998 he became Distinguished University Professor of Chemistry at the University of Houston where he became active in air-quality modeling, and set up the University of Houston’s Environmental Modelling Institute.

Among his many honors, he received the Distinguished Young Chemist Award from the Federation of Asian Chemical Societies in 1997, and the Antarctic Service Medal from the U.S. Department of the Navy in 1994. He is a fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, which awarded him its Rennie Memorial Medal in 1988 for contributions to chemical science. In 1997, he received the Federation of Asian Chemical Societies Distinguished Young Scientist Award.

He is author of more than 163 peer-reviewed scientific articles.

Scott Mabury

Scott Mabury received his undergraduate chemistry degree from Northland College, in Wisconsin in 1984. Environmental photochemistry focused on aqueous hydroxyl radical took him to the University of California-Davis where he completed a PhD in Environmental Chemistry under the mentorship of Prof. Donald Crosby.  Following a short PDF he took up an assistant professorship in environmental chemistry at the University of Toronto.

While maintaining interest in aquatic photochemistry, the main thrust of his group’s research has focused on the role the fluorine atom plays in the fate, disposition, and persistence of fluorinated pesticides, pharmaceuticals, consumer and industrial products.  Significant effort has focused on the PFCA class of chemical pollutants with some success elucidating the sources of these contaminates and the processes at play in their global dissemination.  His group has discovered a number of new contaminants, has determined the mechanism and kinetics for multiple environmental processes, and has worked to influence industry and regulators towards developing friendlier chemical architectures. 

He has ~120 publications, with roughly 80 in the area of fluorinated chemicals, and has delivered ~80 invited talks.  He has been honoured with four teaching awards, a Premier’s Research Excellence Award and an Alumni Award from his alma mater.  Currently, he is winding up a stint as Chair of Chemistry.

Nico M. van Straalen

Nico M. van Straalen studied Biology with a major in Biophysics. He then did a PhD study on life-history strategies of Collembola and developed demographic models for stage-specific population structure analysis. He defended his PhD in 1983. After his PhD study, he focused on ecotoxicology of soil invertebrates, stimulated at the time by the need for a better understanding of soil ecosystems in relation to the emerging societal concern about soil pollution. Together with Dr. Kees van Gestel many contributions were made to the scientific underpinning of risk assessment of environmental pollution, one of the best known being a statistical model for extrapolating ecotoxicity data to sensitive species and deriving environmental quality criteria, published in 1989.

In the 1990s a new line of research was developed, the evolution of tolerance to heavy metals. This became focused on mechanistic explanations and a molecular laboratory was established. After identifying a metallothionein in the springtail species Orchesella cincta, attention was focused on the regulation of gene expression. During a sabbatical leave a textbook on Ecological Genomics was written together with Dr. Dick Roelofs (published by OUP, 2006) and genomics became the frontline of research. In 2007 a repository for springtail genomics was opened (www.collembase.org).
Nico van Straalen is a full professor of Animal Ecology at VU University, Amsterdam.

He is head of a department with some 30 scientific staff in the Institute of Ecological Science, and until 2007 has supervised more than 45 PhD students. He has authored around 270 scientific papers, book chapters and books. He teaches evolutionary biology, molecular ecology and zoology. His special interests include human evolution, giving public lectures and writing newspaper columns on various aspects of biology.