 | This biographical article is written like a résumé .(July 2020) |
Valery E. Forbes is an American ecologist and professor specializing in environmental toxicology. Since the start of the 2022-2023 academic season, she has been the Dean of the Charles E. Schmidt College of Science at Florida Atlantic University. [1] Her research expertise is in ecotoxicology, where she primarily studies effects of environmental stresses on organisms at different levels of biological organization.
As an undergraduate student, Forbes received B. A.'s in Biology and Geology at Binghamton University in 1983. She later attended Stony Brook University, completing her M.S. in Marine Environmental Sciences in 1984, and her PhD in Coastal Oceanography in 1988. [2]
Research in the Forbes lab is aimed at improving environmental management through increased understanding of how risks, such as exposure to toxins and temperature change, impact ecosystems. With over 350 peer reviewed publications and a google scholar citation index of 8658, [3] Forbes is an internationally recognized expert in assessing risks to complex ecosystems through population modeling. Her expertise led to her participation of an advisory council formed to advise SETAC-Europe about using mechanistic effect models for ecological risk assessment of chemicals. [4]
Toxicology is a scientific discipline, overlapping with biology, chemistry, pharmacology, and medicine, that involves the study of the adverse effects of chemical substances on living organisms and the practice of diagnosing and treating exposures to toxins and toxicants. The relationship between dose and its effects on the exposed organism is of high significance in toxicology. Factors that influence chemical toxicity include the dosage, duration of exposure, route of exposure, species, age, sex, and environment. Toxicologists are experts on poisons and poisoning. There is a movement for evidence-based toxicology as part of the larger movement towards evidence-based practices. Toxicology is currently contributing to the field of cancer research, since some toxins can be used as drugs for killing tumor cells. One prime example of this is ribosome-inactivating proteins, tested in the treatment of leukemia.
Pesticides are substances that are used to control pests. They include herbicides, insecticides, nematicides, fungicides, and many others. The most common of these are herbicides, which account for approximately 50% of all pesticide use globally. Most pesticides are used as plant protection products, which in general protect plants from weeds, fungi, or insects. In general, a pesticide is a chemical or biological agent that deters, incapacitates, kills, or otherwise discourages pests. Target pests can include insects, plant pathogens, weeds, molluscs, birds, mammals, fish, nematodes (roundworms), and microbes that destroy property, cause nuisance, or spread disease, or are disease vectors. Along with these benefits, pesticides also have drawbacks, such as potential toxicity to humans and other species.
Bioaccumulation is the gradual accumulation of substances, such as pesticides or other chemicals, in an organism. Bioaccumulation occurs when an organism absorbs a substance faster than it can be lost or eliminated by catabolism and excretion. Thus, the longer the biological half-life of a toxic substance, the greater the risk of chronic poisoning, even if environmental levels of the toxin are not very high. Bioaccumulation, for example in fish, can be predicted by models. Hypothesis for molecular size cutoff criteria for use as bioaccumulation potential indicators are not supported by data. Biotransformation can strongly modify bioaccumulation of chemicals in an organism.
A pesticide poisoning occurs when pesticides, chemicals intended to control a pest, affect non-target organisms such as humans, wildlife, plants, or bees. There are three types of pesticide poisoning. The first of the three is a single and short-term very high level of exposure which can be experienced by individuals who die by suicide, as well as pesticide formulators. The second type of poisoning is long-term high-level exposure, which can occur in pesticide formulators and manufacturers. The third type of poisoning is a long-term low-level exposure, which individuals are exposed to from sources such as pesticide residues in food as well as contact with pesticide residues in the air, water, soil, sediment, food materials, plants and animals.
Ecotoxicology is the study of the effects of toxic chemicals on biological organisms, especially at the population, community, ecosystem, and biosphere levels. Ecotoxicology is a multidisciplinary field, which integrates toxicology and ecology.
Environmental toxicology is a multidisciplinary field of science concerned with the study of the harmful effects of various chemical, biological and physical agents on living organisms. Ecotoxicology is a subdiscipline of environmental toxicology concerned with studying the harmful effects of toxicants at the population and ecosystem levels.
Pesticide drift, also known as spray drift refers to the unintentional diffusion of pesticides toward nontarget species. It is one of the most negative effects of pesticide application. Drift can damage human health, environment, and crops. Together with runoff and leaching, drift is a mechanism for agricultural pollution. Some drift results from contamination of sprayer tanks.
The environmental effects of pesticides describe the broad series of consequences of using pesticides. The unintended consequences of pesticides is one of the main drivers of the negative impact of modern industrial agriculture on the environment. Pesticides, because they are toxic chemicals meant to kill pest species, can affect non-target species, such as plants, animals and humans. Over 98% of sprayed insecticides and 95% of herbicides reach a destination other than their target species, because they are sprayed or spread across entire agricultural fields. Other agrochemicals, such as fertilizers, can also have negative effects on the environment.
P-boxes and probability bounds analysis have been used in many applications spanning many disciplines in engineering and environmental science, including:
Frédéric Yves Bois is a French biological scientist working in toxicology and bioinformatics. He is currently Senior Scientific Advisor at Simcyp, a Certara-owned company.
A mode of toxic action is a common set of physiological and behavioral signs that characterize a type of adverse biological response. A mode of action should not be confused with mechanism of action, which refer to the biochemical processes underlying a given mode of action. Modes of toxic action are important, widely used tools in ecotoxicology and aquatic toxicology because they classify toxicants or pollutants according to their type of toxic action. There are two major types of modes of toxic action: non-specific acting toxicants and specific acting toxicants. Non-specific acting toxicants are those that produce narcosis, while specific acting toxicants are those that are non-narcotic and that produce a specific action at a specific target site.
Tissue residue is the concentration of a chemical or compound in an organism's tissue or in a portion of an organism's tissue. Tissue residue is used in aquatic toxicology to help determine the fate of chemicals in aquatic systems, bioaccumulation of a substance, or bioavailability of a substance, account for multiple routes of exposure, and address an organism's exposure to chemical mixtures. A tissue residue approach to toxicity testing is considered a more direct and less variable measure of chemical exposure and is less dependent on external environmental factors than measuring the concentration of a chemical in the exposure media.
Drug pollution or pharmaceutical pollution is pollution of the environment with pharmaceutical drugs and their metabolites, which reach the aquatic environment through wastewater. Drug pollution is therefore mainly a form of water pollution.
An adverse outcome pathway (AOP) is structured representation of biological events leading to adverse effects and is considered relevant to risk assessment. The AOP links in a linear way existing knowledge along one or more series of causally connected key events (KE) between two points — a molecular initiating event (MIE) and an adverse outcome (AO) that occur at a level of biological organization relevant to risk assessment. The linkage between the events is described by key event relationships (KER) that describe the causal relationships between the key events.
Henrik Wenzel is a Danish engineer and head of SDU Life Cycle Engineering at University of Southern Denmark (SDU).
Toxicological databases are large compilations of data derived from aquatic and environmental toxicity studies. Data is aggregated from a large number of individual studies in which toxic effects upon aquatic and terrestrial organisms have been determined for different chemicals. These databases are then used by toxicologists, chemists, regulatory agencies and scientists to investigate and predict the likelihood that an organic or inorganic chemical will cause an adverse effect on exposed organisms.
Deborah Liebl Swackhamer was an environmental chemist and professor emerita at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Swackhamer applied her expertise in studying the effects of exposure to toxic chemicals, as well as the processes that spread those chemicals, to developing policies that address exposure risks.
The Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) is an international environmental toxicology and environmental chemistry organization.
Gerald A. LeBlanc is an American biologist, toxicologist, author, and academic. He is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biological Sciences at the North Carolina State University.
Warren P. Porter is a biophysical ecologist, environmental toxicologist, and an academic. He is an emeritus Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)| Authority control databases: Academics |
|---|
