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Hello.
My name is Peter LaPuma.
And I'm George Gray.
And we'd like to welcome you to environmental health
in a sustainable world.
One of the nice things about our course
is that there's not a lot of people
really know what environmental health is.
Upfront anyway.
And so some folks come to the course kind of, well,
I have to take this course, it's required of me.
And we always have the luxury of having students, especially
in the feedbacks and all, to tell us
that they were absolutely delighted that they took
the course, that they didn't realize all that was involved
in environmental and occupational health.
So what we'd like to do is introduce ourselves and maybe
then tell you a little bit about the course.
So I'll start off.
So my name is Pete Lapooma.
I actually retired from the Air Force.
I was in the Air Force for 21 years.
My first 10 years I spent mostly in occupational health.
So we were worried mostly about worker health and safety,
making sure that noise and radiation
and chemical exposures and things
like that, that workers were safe in their environment.
And we'd do things like recommend respirators
or ventilation systems and things like that.
In the last half of my career in the Air Force,
I started getting more into environmental sciences.
And we started doing things that were
sort of traditional back in the '90s like Superfund
sites and air pollution.
And I started to realize that the things that I kept
confronting had a lot to do with energy.
A lot of the air pollutants that we come across
are sort of linked to burning fossil fuels.
And so I started to get more interested in looking
for alternative energy, other maybe more sustainable forms
of energy.
And then came along George Washington University
who saved me and now I get to teach many students
about environmental science.
So that's some of my history.
As I said, I'm George Gray.
I'm a professor here in the School of Public
Health and Health Services at George Washington University.
I'm trained as a toxicologist but I've spent my career
doing research and practice around the area of risk
analysis.
So I'm interested in how we take scientific information,
we process it to understand which risks are real
and which ones aren't, we try to understand how big they are
and we think about how to do something about them.
And then, ultimately-- something we'll
learn about later in the class-- how
do we communicate about risks?
So I spent my-- the first part of my career
at the Harvard School of Public Health
and then came here to Washington DC
to serve as the assistant administrator for the Office
of Research and Development at EPA.
The Office of Research and Development
is sort of EPA's think tank.
It's the scientists and engineers
who do research to help the agency be ready
for our coming scientific challenges.
I then stayed here in Washington DC
and was very happy to join the faculty George Washington
University.
And since then, I've been teaching
in this class for several years with Professor LaPuma.
Really enjoy sharing both the insights
we've learned from our research and from our real life
experience with our students.
So let's tell you a little bit about the class.
One of the ways we like to describe the class
is it's really kind of an inch deep and a mile wide.
The reason I say it that way is because
environmental occupational health is
a very large umbrella.
We literally have a dozen different topic areas
from climate change and energy and water
and wastewater and environmental risk assessment, toxicology.
And it's hard to get a lot of depth
into each one of those areas but we're
going to give you enough of a flavor
to be able to have a better sense for things.
When you confront things in the outside world,
you're more well rounded to be able to synthesize and put
things into perspective.
Many times, environmental and occupational health
will interact with your background.
A lot of-- even if you're unrelated right
now to environmental health, many things that we
do in public health are influenced by the environment
and hopefully we'll point that out as the course goes on.
You'll have a better feel for the importance
of environmental and occupational health
as a society, when you're a voter, as a public health
professional.
And we're going to give you some tips
are going to help you use that information in your daily life.
One of the things we often find is
that students, when they're made more
aware of environmental issues, is you start to notice it more.
You'll start to notice it in the newspaper, in the news.
In fact, we like to joke that we're on the 6 o'clock news
almost every night.
Whether it's an oil spill in the Gulf or it's
climate change or the Keystone pipeline.
If you're a human being on planet Earth
and you eat and you breathe and you drink,
you're interacting with your environment every single day.
And don't forget about things like food safety.
Salmonella in food or pharmaceuticals in the water.
All of these things require a mix of science and analysis
and management.
And that's the kind of thing we're
going to be talking about in this class.
So it's important to sort of understand
some of the interactions that might go on.
Everybody wants to know how bad is this
and will this stuff hurt me.
And so what we try to do in environmental science
is try to measure and understand those things
and try to put it into some perspective.
Hopefully, when we open the doors
and we take a look around, it'll influence
you to see environmental health in the way
that it interacts with you every day.
We've worked really hard and putting this course together
in this format.
We've had a lot of fun doing it, and I
think you're going to find it a really good way
to learn this really interesting topic.
Probably something that's going to help you out,
too, is that because the course has a lot of information--
we're going to cover a lot of material-- hopefully
a lot of it perspective.
It's not necessarily intended for you
have to memorize everything.
So in the course syllabus, there's learning objectives.
And those learning objectives are
going to be critical for you to be
able to understand the course.
And those are really the areas that we want you to key on.
The hint is that may be information you really
want to know for later on for, say, testable material.
We do that because we know we go through a lot of information
and it can be overwhelming when you first see it.
So we don't necessarily intend for you
to know everything and have everything memorized,
but if it's in the learning objectives, that's
a pretty important spot to really cue in on and make
sure you know and understand.
So that's kind of our way of compensating for test anxiety
we know is going to be alive and well.
It always is.
But this is kind of our way to zoom you
in the important materials.
So with that, we just hope you really enjoy the material.
We hope so our enthusiasm for the subject matter
comes out in the course.
We both really do enjoy teaching this course
and we hope that enthusiasm rubs off on you.