UB Sets Earth Day Environmental Science Colloquium

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Ecologist and author Sandra Steingraber and Germaine Buck, chief of the Epidemiology Branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, will be the keynote speakers at the Earth Day Environmental Science Colloquium, to be held April 19 in the atrium and Screening Room of the Center for the Arts on the UB North (Amherst) Campus.

The colloquium will be sponsored by UB's Environment and Society Institute, the Environmental Health Sciences Graduate Group, the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, the Environmental Studies Interdisciplinary Degree Program and UB Green.

Buck, a former UB professor of social and preventive medicine, will speak at 10:30 a.m. in the Screening Room. Steingraber, an internationally recognized expert on environmental links to cancer, will speak at 1:30 p.m. in the Screening Room. She also will speak at 7 p.m. April 18 in the Allen Hall Theatre, South (Main Street) Campus. That appearance, sponsored by WBFO 88.7 FM in conjunction with the Environment and Society Institute and the Presbytery of Western New York, will be free and open to the public.

Buck, who received master's and doctoral degrees from UB, joined the NIH in September 2000. Her research interests include male and female reproductive health, threats to human fecundity and fertility, and adverse perinatal outcomes. She is particularly interested in parental environmental exposures and their effects on human reproduction and development, as well as novel methodologies for advancing epidemiologic study of these endpoints.

Steingraber, dubbed "the new Rachel Carson" by the Sierra Club, is the author of "Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment," a highly acclaimed book that presents cancer as a human rights issue. It was the first to bring together data on toxic releases --now available under right-to-know laws -- with data from U.S. cancer registries.

In addition to the keynote speeches, the colloquium will feature exhibits and poster presentations in the atrium on topics in the environmental sciences by interested scientists, faculty members, and graduate and undergraduate students

For further information, contact Ann B. Salter at salter@acsu.buffalo.edu>.