On Thursday May 1, 2008, graduate student Lisa Gallagher successfully completed her thesis defense. Lisa's thesis, titled "Refining Exposure Assessment Methods Using GIS-based Models: Drinking Water Contaminants and Breast Cancer Risk on Cape Cod, MA," involved work with project 1 and project 2.

The Research Translation Core recently completed an overhaul of the BU SBRP website. The new website has many of same columns and features of the old site (including Ask the Researcher, the RSS Starter Kit, and a collection of Google Maps with environmental health information), while also allowing us to create new features including an Environmental Health News Feeds page and a BU SBRP Discussion Forum.

The Environmental Health News Feeds page aggreagates RSS feeds of recently published articles from Environmental Health Persepspectives, updates from the Hazardous Waste Clean Up Information (CLU-IN) website, and news of the recent activities of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). 

The BU SBRP Discussion Forum is a moderated discussion space to post information or questions on Web 2.0 technologies, or environmental health research.

If you have any comments or questions about the new site please feel free to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . 

BU SBRP researchers Tom Webster (project 2), Veronica Vieira (project 2), Ann Aschengrau (project 1), and graduate student Kate Hoffman recently collaborated on a publication titled "Community and Individual-Level Socioeconomic Status and Breast Cancer Risk: Multi-level Modeling on Cape Cod, MA" in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. In this paper the researchers constructed models for breast cancer risk for individual level socio-economic status (SES), community level SES, and a multi-level analysis including both. Results showed that women with the highest education were at greater risk for developing breast cancer. Women living in the highest SES communities also had greater risk of developing breast cancer.

Environmental Health Perspectives is an Open Access Publication, and a full text PDF of this publication is available online.

Ann Aschengrau (project 1) has responded to a new question submitted to our "Ask the Researcher" forum.

Q. My wife was a child during her exposure to the contaminated drinking water at camp LeJeune. We have three children, the first was diagnosed with Oxidative Phosphorylation disorder. Have there been any studies looking at the offspring of females who had long term exposure to tetrachloroethylene (PCE) and associated by-products as children?

A.There are a few studies on the health effects of prenatal and early childhood exposure to tetrachloroethylene, but, to the best of our knowledge, no studies on possible health effects among their offspring. This means that there have been a few studies to determine if there are ill effects among people like your wife but there have not been any studies (yet) on individuals like your children. So far, our own studies on Cape Cod do not show any adverse impact of PCE exposure during pregnancy or childhood on the risk of low birth weight, prematurity, and learning disabilities. However, we are continuing our research to determine if there are subtle neurological effects of prenatal and early childhood exposure.



To read her other responses or to learn more about Dr. Aschengrau's work please visit her Ask the Researcher page. To submit a question to one of our researchers send an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .