Profiles: Scientists

Jim Brophy, PhD

Jim Brophy is Executive Director for the Occupational Health Clinic for Ontario Workers.

He has been instrumental in studying and warning about the dangers of pollution to the residents of Aamjiwnaang First Nation in Sarnia, Ontario including how chemical pollution has skewed the birth ratio on the reserve where more girls are born than boys.

Dr. Theo Colborn, PhD

Theo Colborne has a PhD in zoology and has been the senior scientist and director of the Wildlife Contaminants program of the World Wildlife Fund. As director of the Wildlife and Contaminants Program, she was the first researcher to prove the "endocrine disrupting hypothesis" by compiling information from many scientific disciplines that demonstrated how synthetic chemicals in the environment were mimicking or disrupting the body's natural hormonal system, the very system that controls development from the moment the sperm enters the egg until an individual is born.

In 1996 she co-authored a book for the general public called, Our Stolen Future. In the book, Dr. Colborn discusses about the urgency of this problem, and suggests what needs to be done. Today she is still a leading spokesperson on this subject and continues to compile data from scientific studies.

Elizabeth A. Guillette, PhD

Dr. Guillette is known for her anthropological interpretations regarding the interplay between contaminants, human health, and society.

One of her groundbreaking research studies was the children of the people of the Yaqui Valley in Mexico who were exposed to insecticides, herbicides, and other agricultural chemicals. She found that the pesticide-exposed children were less proficient at catching a ball, reflective of poor eye-hand coordination. They had lower stamina levels. Most striking were their drawings of people. The pesticide-exposed four-year-olds of the valley made scribbles and the five-year-olds frequently made a circle at the bottom of the paper and a line upward to represent the body. Others drew odd shapes with abstract divisions, where dots represented eyes and enclosed areas were body parts.

Louis Guillette, PhD

Louis Guillette Jr. is Distinguished Professor of Zoology at The University of Florida in Gainesville - The Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His studies centre on how environmental factors influence the development and functioning of the reproduction system in vertebrates including:

• The influence of contaminants on the developmental and reproductive biology of wildlife and humans,
• endangered species reproduction and
• the evolution of maternal-fetal chemical communication.

He has focused on the ability of environmental contaminants, like pesticides, industrial chemicals and detergent products to mimic chemical messengers. (hormones) and alter the reproductive systems. He has studied the effects of these chemicals on alligators and fish. He has edited, and contributed to hundreds of scientific articles.

David R. Helton, Toxicologist, President and Chief Scientific Officer of Cenomed BioSciences LLC and Cenomed, Inc.

David has over twenty-five years of drug development experience and has a diversified research and development background. He is highly published and recognized with over 120 scientific papers and 100 patents worldwide. In 2002, David founded Cenomed, Inc., a pharmaceutical discovery and development company with research areas focused on cognition, psychosis and chemical defense.

Margaret Keith, PhD

Margaret Keith is employed as the Research coordinator at the Occupational Health Clinic for Ontario Workers in Sarnia, Ontario.

She undertook a number of community-based studies, uncovering asbestos disease in Sarnia at the Holmes Foundry and other workplaces. She has also co-authored along with James Brophy and Matthew Firth the book Workplace Roulette: Gambling with Cancer.

David Michaels, PhD

Dr. David Michaels is a Research Professor and Associate Chairman in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health (EOH) at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services.

He is the author of Doubt Is Their Product, a criticism of how public relations has blocked one public health protection after another. He draws comparisons between the techniques first used to reassure the public about tobacco and those used by other industries to reassure the public about asbestos, lead, vinyl chloride and other chemicals.

John Peterson Myers, PhD

John Peterson Myers is founder, CEO and Chief Scientist of Environmental Health Sciences. Along with co-authors Dr. Theo Colborn and Dianne Dumanoski, Myers wrote Our Stolen Future, a book (1996) that explores the scientific basis of concern for how contamination threatens fetal development.

Shanna H. Swan, Ph.D.

Dr. Swan is an epidemiologist and biostatistician. She is a Professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Director of the Center for Reproductive Epidemiology at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry.

She has focused her research on identifying reproductive risks from environmental exposures. She is also known for her work on the impact of environmental exposures on male and female reproductive health and has served on the National Academy of Science's Committee on Hormone-Related Toxicants.

Since 1998, Dr. Swan has been Principal Investigator of the Study for Future Families, a multi-center pregnancy cohort study examining environmental causes of geographic variation in reproductive health endpoints in men, women and children. Dr. Swan was elected Chair of the 2008 Gordon Research Conference on Environmental Endocrine Disruptors.

Sarah A. Vogel

Dr. Vogel's research examines political, economic, and scientific changes in the United States in the last four decades of the twentieth century through the story of one chemical, bisphenol A. The research begins in the 1960s with the establishment of regulations affecting plastics' contact with food and bisphenol A's introduction into plastics production. It then traces the intersecting histories of scientific research, environmentalism, regulation, and plastics production up to the present. Through this case history, this project provides unique insight into the making of our environment, economy, and health.