Scope | Faculty & Staff Notes

Presentations & Conferences

Richard T. Di Giulio, professor of environmental toxicology and director, Duke Superfund Basic Research Center, co-presented “Mechanisms of Interactive Developmental Toxicity of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons in Zebrafish,” and “Synergistic Developmental Toxicity of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons: Towards a Mechanistic Understanding,” with Duke colleague Elwood Linney, and others, at the Conference on Physiological Responses in Marine Organisms 13 in Alessandria, Italy, in June.

Michael Lavine, professor of statistics and decision sciences, and M. Susan Lozier, professor of physical oceanography, were invited to present their collaborative work, “Detecting Climate Change in the Ocean,” at the Eighth Workshop on Case Studies in Bayesian Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pa., in September.

Marie Lynn Miranda, associate research professor and director, Children’s Environmental Health Initiative, was one of several area scientists to participate in a town meeting on Environmental and Neurodevelopmental Disorders Over the Lifespan. The meeting, sponsored by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and held in Research Triangle Park, opened the 22nd International Neurotoxicology Conference. Miranda presented and discussed research on lead mapping.

A. Brad Murray, associate professor of geomorphology and coastal processes, gave an invited talk in April at the European Geosciences Union meeting in Vienna, Austria, “Bedform Pattern Evolution in Two Horizontal Dimensions: Extreme Wavelength Increases with Mixed Grain Sizes.” The Nicholas School was well represented at the July conference of Coastal Zone 05, “Balancing on the Edge,” held in New Orleans, La. Attending were Michael K. Orbach, professor of the practice of marine affairs and policy and director, Duke University Marine Laboratory, Daphne Pee, MEM’03; Lindsay Fullencamp, MEM’03; and Heidi Recksiek MEM/MPP’97. Pee chaired the symposium “Assessing Marine Protected Areas and Networks,” and Recksiek chaired “Social Science Methods for Marine Protected Areas: An Overview for MPA Managers and Staff.”

Daniel D. Richter Jr., professor of soils and forest ecology, attended the 2005 Goldschmidt Conference on Geochemistry and Mineralogy in Moscow, Idaho, to give an invited talk, “Rhizosphere Iron-Redox Cycling: Electron Transfer Reactions that Drive Mineral Weathering,” with Nicholas School graduate Ryan L. Fimmen PhD’04 and Bowdoin College professor Dharni Vasudevan.

James Salzman, professor of environmental law and policy, was the lunch speaker at Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation’s biennial institute for natural resource law professors in Santa Fe, N.M. in June. He presented “Creating Markets for Ecosystem Services.”

At a May workshop co-sponsored by Stanford University, The Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund, Salzman presented “Conservation Incentives that Work for People on the Land,” about the promise and peril of ecosystem service payments.

William H. Schlesinger, James B. Duke Professor of biogeochemistry and dean of the Nicholas School, participated in the NC Environmental Defense forum “Horizons 2100: A Vision for the Future.” The forum was held in three different locations: Raleigh, Charlotte and Asheville, N.C., during April and May.

In March, Schlesinger testified in hearings before the N.C. Senate Agriculture, Environment and Natural Resources Committee on the subject of global climate change in North Carolina. Also in March, Schlesinger participated in the conference “One North Carolina Naturally,” held at the Raleigh Conference and Convention Center.

Martin D. Smith, assistant professor of environmental economics, had a busy spring and summer on the conference circuit. In April, he presented “A Spatial Bioeconomic Model of Nutrient Pollution” for the 3rd Workshop on Spatial-Dynamic Models of Economics and Ecosystems held at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, in Trieste, Italy. Also that month, Smith and Stephen Toth Professor of Marine Biology Larry B. Crowder gave an invited presentation, “Valuing Ecosystem Services with Fishery Rents: A Lumped-Parameter Approach to Hypoxia in the Neuse River Estuary,” for the National Science Foundation- Environmental Protection Agency Biocomplexity Workshop in Santa Fe, N.M. Later in May, Smith and Crowder presented this work to the 2005 Forum of the North American Association of Fisheries Economists in Vancouver, B.C., Canada, where Smith also made another presentation on “A Hierarchical Bayes Approach to Discrete Choice Fisheries Modeling” with J. Zhang MEM’03 et al.

In June, for the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists 2005 Workshop: Natural Resources at Risk, Smith presented “Ecosystem Portfolios: A Finance-Based Approach to Ecosystem Management,” at Grand Teton National Park, Jackson, Wyo. Finally in July, Smith presented “Bayesian Bioeconomics of Marine Reserves” at the American Agricultural Economics Association Annual Meeting in Providence, R.I.

Jonathan B. Wiener, professor of law and of environmental policy, presented “Precaution in the U.S. and Europe” for the conference Better Regulation: The European Union (EU) and the Transatlantic Dialogue. This conference, co-sponsored by the European Policy Centre, the European Commission, and the U.S. Mission to the EU, was held in Brussels, Belgium, in March. In April, Wiener was at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies in New Haven, Conn., where he presented “Beyond Kyoto: Moving Climate Change Policy Forward,” and, in June, he gave the keynote address, “Hormesis and Regulation,” to the Fourth Annual International Conference on Hormesis at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.