U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA; Washington, D.C.; www.epa.gov) Administrator Lisa P. Jackson has appointed two engineers to serve as the chairs of two independent Federal Advisory Committees: the EPA Science Advisory Board (SAB) and the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC).
David Allen, an internationally recognized engineer specializing in air quality will serve as the SAB Chair and H. Christopher Frey, an environmental engineer expert in quantitative methods for dealing with variability and uncertainty, will serve as the CASAC Chair. They will each serve a two-year term.
Allen is the Gertz Regents Professor of Chemical Engineering and the Director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Resources at the University of Texas at Austin. As Director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Resources at UT-Austin and as Director of the Air Quality Research Program of the State of Texas, he brings extensive leadership experience to the position. He is replacing Deborah Swackhamer as outgoing SAB chair.
H. Christopher Frey is a Professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. He directs a multidisciplinary research program in the broad area of environmental systems analysis, including development and demonstration of quantitative methods for risk assessment, technology evaluation and air pollutant emissions. Frey is a past president of the Society for Risk Analysis. He is replacing Jonathan Samet as outgoing CASAC chair.
The SAB and the CASAC are independently chartered Federal Advisory Committees composed of external scientists and engineers. The SAB provides advice to the EPA Administrator on the scientific and technical information being used or proposed as the basis for EPA decisions. The CASAC provides advice to the EPA Administrator on the technical bases for EPA’s standards for criteria air pollutants.
More information on the SAB is available at www.epa.gov/sab.
More information about CASAC is available at www.epa.gov/casac.