Joint Facuty Appointments in Environmental Toxicology

PI: Leslie Butler, LSUBR

Co-PI: Robert Miller, SUBR

New Hires: Currently Recruiting

Abstract

This proposal to the Board of Regents 1999 Joint Faculty Appointments Program requests funding to help hire two tenure-track faculty at Southern University and A&M College at Baton Rouge (SUBR) and Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge (LSUBR) in the area of environmental toxicology, with the appointments to be made in the Departments of Chemistry at the two institutions.

Environmental toxicology is a broad area. Chemically related areas include, but are not limited to, organic free radical chemistry and physical characterization of toxic/protein and toxic/nucleic acid interactions.

This is an opportune time to add faculty in environmental toxicology to the chemistry departments at both institutions. Southern University anticipates adding a new doctoral program in environmental toxicology. A Board of Regents Review Team (BORRT) visited the SUBR campus in May of 1999 to evaluate the proposed doctoral program and presented its evaluation report to the SUBR chemistry and biology faculties in June of 1999. Presently a selected group of SUBR faculty are preparing SUBR's response to several concerns raised in the BORRT evaluation report. LSUBR has just hired a chaired professor in environmental chemistry who seeks to build an NIEHS (National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences)-supported center; the center needs more environmental toxicologists.

The proposed JFAP has strong potential for meeting both current and future needs of the chemistry departments at LSUBR and SUBR. Since modern environmental toxicology research is necessarily multi-disciplinary, the proposed JFAP will ultimately involve departments at the two institutions other than chemistry. Certainly approval of the anticipated doctoral program in environmental toxicology at SUBR will constitute the ideal environment for the envisioned JFAP between LSUBR and SUBR, but the implementation and success of the proposed JFAP is not parasitically tied to the proposed doctoral program. Since SUBR already has a master's program in environmental chemistry, the JFAP described in this proposal can function without the implementation of the anticipated doctoral program in environmental toxicology at SUBR.