The BU SBRP Outreach Core has collaborated with Ann Backus from the Harvard-NIEHS Center for Environmental Health to form the Environmental Health Nursing Education Collaborative. The goal of this collaboration is to contribute to the education and training of nurses by helping their faculty integrate environmental health into the nursing curriculum. The Collaborative has started providing lectures for nursing courses in the greater Boston area wishing to incorporate environmental health topics into their curricula and has launched a wiki-based website (www.ehnursing.org). The website contains lists of environmental health continuing education opportunities for nurses, relevant publications, and other online resources.

In an effort to reduce barriers to data, the BU SBRP Research Translation Core has combined existing data sources to make a series of Google Maps. These maps include Superfund sites in Massachusetts (linked to contaminant information), solid waste facilities in Massachusetts, and 21E (State hazardous waste) sites in Massachusetts. In addition to the maps, the Research Translation Core has also posted the KMZ files online allowing users to open various data layers in Google Earth. To view these maps or to download the data files, please visit the new Maps section of the BU SBRP webpage.

Doctoral candidate Greg Howard recently presented a talk titled "Modeling Mixtures of Full and Partial Agonists Using Generalized Concentration Addition" during the Computational Approaches session of the 2007 SBRP annual meeting in North Carolina. Greg's work, with Tom Webster (project 2), focuses on methods for assessing and predicting interactions-additive, synergistic, or antagonistic- between toxic exposures. Recently, this has included developing a model of additivity for mixtures of full and partial-agonist dioxin-like agents, as well as rationalizing definitions of additivity in toxicology and in epidemiology.

On November 27, 2007, BU SBRP researcher Mark Hahn (Project 5) presented a seminar at the Rhode Island Institutional Development Award (IDeA) Network of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE).

BU SBRP researchers Mark Hahn (project 5) and David Sherr (project 4) have a new publication titled "Repression of aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AHR) signaling by AHR repressor (AHRR): Role of DNA binding and competition for ARNT" in the journal Molecular Pharmacology. In this paper the authors propose a mechanism for aryl hydrocarbon receptor signaling through protein-protein interactions.