f. owen hoffman, Ph.D.
Senior Scientist
Dr. Hoffman is the president emeritus of Oak Ridge Center for Risk Analysis. He has more than 30 years experience on the evaluation of the dose to humans from the release and transport of radionuclides and chemicals in terrestrial and aquatic systems. He is recognized nationally and internationally for his contributions to the development and evaluation of mathematical models for environmental transfer and human risk assessment.
Early in his career, he worked for the U.S. National Park Service as a park ranger/naturalist at Crater Lake, Zion, and Yosemite, doing research on the vertical movements of zooplankton at Crater Lake. He served on the German National Advisory Council on Radiation Ecology while employed as an environmental scientist with the Institut fur Reaktorsicherheit in Cologne, Germany,where he developed the first formal procedures for evaluating the transport and fate of contaminants released to air and water. He later joined the research staff at the Environmental Sciences Division of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he worked for 17 years.
Widely recognized as an authority on environmental risk, Dr. Hoffman has been instrumental in promoting an iterative approach to risk assessment using quantitative uncertainty and sensitivity analysis to direct efforts to improve the state of knowledge about key model components. He has authored more than 80 publications on the movement of trace levels of contaminants in the environment and on quantitative approaches to uncertainty analysis, and he has presented numerous lectures and workshops on quantitative methods for assessment of uncertainty in exposure, dose, and risk. Two of his most significant publications are IAEA Safety Series No. 100 ("On the Reliability of Predictions Made with Environmental Transfer Models," International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna, 1989), and NCRP Commentary No. 14 ("A Guide for Uncertainty Analysis in Dose and Risk Assessment Related to Environmental Contamination," National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, 1996).
Dr. Hoffman has led several international projects to assess the uncertainty in mathematical models used for exposure assessment and to compare model predictions against independent data sets. He led international efforts formerly sponsored by the Swedish National Institute for Radiation Protection and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to validate radiological transport models using Chernobyl data. He is currently a member of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP) and a corresponding member of the International Commission on Radiological Protection. He is a member of the Society for Risk Analysis and has served as their liaison to the NCRP. He is a past member of the Radiation Advisory Committee of EPA’s Science Advisory Board, in which he chaired the SAB review of the EPA’s assessment of uncertainty in radiogenic cancer. He has served as an advisor to dose reconstruction projects managed by the States of Tennessee and Colorado, the National Cancer Institute, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr. Hoffman is experienced in directing historical dose reconstructions for radionuclides released to the environment. He is currently directing several tasks associated with a detailed reconstruction of a historical radiation dose evaluation from past operations at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL), as part of a technical team led by Sanford Cohen & Associates that is providing scientific support in dose reconstruction to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He also serves as advisor to the University of Utah to assist in the reconstruction of the models and assumptions used to calculate individual thyroid doses in the "Cohort Study of Thyroid Disease and Radioactive Fallout from the Nevada Test Site." In the Oak Ridge Dose Reconstruction project, Dr. Hoffman headed the task to evaluate historical exposures to members of the public in East Tennessee from iodine-131 released from local federal facilities and from fallout from testing of nuclear weapons in Nevada.
Dr. Hoffman has directed the development of several interactive dose-and-risk calculators for Nevada Test Site fallout, hosted on the websites of the National Cancer Institute and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
Dr. Hoffman is a board member for the Crater Lake Institute, an educational non-profit group whose mission is to enhance the visitor experience at Crater Lake National Park in Southern Oregon. Dr. Hoffman spent his formative years working at Crater Lake National Park as a naturalist ranger. http://www.craterlakeinstitute.com
E-mail Dr. Hoffman at: orrisk@orrisk.com
