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The Humpty Dumpty Approach to Safer Beginnings
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(December, 2004) One of the goals of the Office of Research and Development's (ORD) scientific and engineering researchers is to try to understand the interplay of the many factors that affect human health and environmental quality. The things that we come in contact with and the things that we do can interact in puzzling ways, sometimes with surprising outcomes. How do researchers go about their work to promote understanding of these outcomes? In a 1991 monograph 1, David Easton articulates the nature of the puzzle clearly by stating,
"Herein lies one of the major crises of modern knowledge. It is what I have called the Humpty Dumpty problem. To understand the world it has seemed necessary to analyze it by breaking it into many pieces (i.e., the disciplines and their own divisions). But to act in the world, to try to address the issues for the understanding of which highly specialized knowledge was presumably sought, we need to somehow reassemble all the pieces. Here is the rub. Try as we may, we are no more able than all the king's horses and all the king's men to put our knowledge together again for coping with the whole real problems of the world."
This is the challenging playing field that engages ORD's engineers and scientists as they try to put together often disparate pieces of knowledge into a knowable whole. It takes a special kind of person-with unusual drive and insight-to undertake such tasks. The March 26, 2001, Chemical Engineering News was a Special Issue devoted to highlighting the careers and research interests of New Voices in Chemistry. That Special Issue highlighted ". . . the thoughts and aspirations of 171 young chemists, chemical engineers, and business leaders, who collectively describe a vibrant and challenging future for the chemical enterprise". One of those featured scientists is Dr. Elaine A. Cohen Hubal. She joined ORD's National Exposure Research Laboratory (NERL) in 1997. From 2002-2004 she served as Acting Associate Director for Human Exposure Modeling within the Human Exposure and Atmospheric Sciences Division in Research Triangle Park, N.C. Currently, she is on a detail to the ORD's National Health and Environmental Effects Laboratory (NHEERL). During this detail, her work is focused on Physiologically Based Pharmacokinetic (PBPK) modeling.
Dr. Cohen Hubal is a Chemical Engineer who has tailored her research to understanding the role of exposure to environmental stressors in determining the health and well-being of some of our most sensitive citizens: the young. Children may be particularly vulnerable to a range of threats that are environmental, chemical, behavioral, genetic or disease-related. Through such work as that designed, conducted and reported by Dr. Cohen Hubal we are learning each day that these threats do not-and should not be expected to-act independently. Her work here focuses on understanding how we can support proactively the normal but at times perilous voyages of children towards healthful and productive lives.
Although she says that she had a lot of academic interests including biology, each of Cohen Hubal's degrees is in Chemical Engineering. She received her Bachelor of Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her Masters of Science and Doctorate from North Carolina State University. She spent four years as a Predoctoral Fellow with the Chemical Industry Institute of Technology (CIIT) in Research Triangle park, NC. She also worked as a Chemical Engineer for Camp Dresser and McKee in Boston in the late 1980s and for RTI International prior to coming to EPA.
A primary thrust of Dr. Cohen Hubal's work with NERL has involved the design of studies to evaluate dermal exposure assessment approaches. These studies are instrumental in the collection of exposure factor data that are used to support implementation of the Food Quality Protection Act. Prior to coming to EPA, she contributed to development of a modeling framework for use in predicting the transport and fate of contaminants to conduct exposure assessments in support of the Hazardous Waste Identification Rule. Also, she developed and applied a variety of computational models to describe the simultaneous mass transport-and reaction-of inhaled gases in the airway lining. This modeling was part of a larger effort designed to reduce uncertainties in risk assessment of inhaled toxicants.
Part of the motivation for her choice of an engineering science career came likely from her parents who are also in science related fields. Early childhood career interests included archeology and geology. Later, she saw herself as an architect-reflecting her artistic side. In fact, she includes water color painting and gardening as welcome diversions from research tasks. When asked who has been a major influence on, or mentor to her career, Cohen Hubal points to her husband saying that he ". . .is supportive and does not let her give up."
Since, she says, ". . . the most interesting questions in science require a variety of inputs", she was drawn to work at an EPA National Laboratory by the range of opportunities to undertake multidisciplinary research. Dr. Cohen Hubal credits her interest in remaining at an EPA research facility to opportunities to interact with a wide variety of scientists both within and from outside the Agency. Recent activities include serving as a Core Member of the Peer Consultation Panel in the Voluntary Children's Chemical Evaluation Program, and working with the American Chemistry Council's Long-Range Research Initiative. 
Also, she has gained critical insights-for example, from interactions with research colleagues in Japan-relating to cultural differences in perspectives on communities and children that are relevant to her exposure research.
In all of the research that she has conducted over the past 15 years she has applied engineering principles-and a multidisciplinary approach-to systematically explain and evaluate the interaction of environmental and biological systems. She first started to apply this approach to reduce uncertainty in children's exposure assessment coincident with the birth of her son about seven years ago. She believes that she remains engaged by this work due to the stochastic (that is, involving or showing random behavior; or, involving guesswork or conjecture) element of human behavior and the variability associated with children's activities. She is challenged by the fact that the systems are so complicated and that there are still significant gaps associated with our understanding of human exposure. Cohen Hubal is not deterred by our lack of understanding of the causes of and influences on exposure; her work focuses solidly on how to clearly measure and define exposures for subsequent use in health studies and risk characterizations (that is, descriptions of the character or nature of something).
Asked where the field of Children's Exposure Research is going in light of-or despite-EPA's and ORD's priorities, Cohen Hubal recognized that now, ". . .communities call for consideration of the full spectrum of stressors to vulnerable populations, [and this means that] information on risks to multiple chemicals that is developed by EPA will be better coordinated with information collected by other agencies to track and improve public health." She notes that EPA's Regions and the States have been dealing with these issues for some time.
She wishes that the public understood better that, ". . .science is a multi-step process; more of a journey than a destination". As highlighted by the Humpty Dumpty analogy at the beginning of this Spotlight, she sees science as ". . .something like trying to do a jigsaw puzzle without the picture in front of you. Once you get some pieces together you have one view. As you fit more pieces and a more complete picture is developed, that initial view is either confirmed or found to be misleading. Each time you do a puzzle, you learn better approaches for tackling the next puzzle."
The Office of Research and Development is committed to showing the difference the important work its scientists and engineers are making in peoples lives. We welcome your reaction to-and any comments on-this "Spotlight" feature article; please send them to draggan.sidney@epa.gov.
1 Easton, David and Corinne Saposs Schelling (Eds.). 1991. Divided knowledge : across disciplines, across cultures. SagePublications, Newbury Park, CA. pp. 261. Back