EPA Fellowship Alternatives Assessing Toxicity of Environmental Contaminants to Aquatic Organisms

Organization

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

EPA-OCSPP-IO-

A research opportunity is currently available at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention (OCSPP), with the Andrew W. Breidenbach Environmental Research Center located in Cincinnati, Ohio.

The mission of EPA is to protect human health and the environment. EPA works to ensure that:
Americans have clean air, land and water;
National efforts to reduce environmental risks are based on the best available scientific information;
Federal laws protecting human health and the environment are administered and enforced fairly, effectively and as Congress intended;
Environmental stewardship is integral to U.S. policies concerning natural resources, human health, economic growth, energy, transportation, agriculture, industry, and international trade, and these factors are similarly considered in establishing environmental policy;
All parts of society have access to accurate information sufficient to effectively participate in managing human health and environmental risks;
Contaminated lands and toxic sites are cleaned up; and chemicals in the marketplace are reviewed for safety.

Due to the large number of chemicals in commerce and subsequently introduced into the environment, chemical safety assessments based on traditional animal testing have been unable to keep pace with the need to generate hazard information to support screening, prioritization, and both human health and ecological risk assessment. To address this, EPA's Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention is developing and evaluating alternative testing approaches (termed "new approach methodologies") for generating toxicity information in a more rapid and cost-effective manner while still providing data that are equivalent to or better than that derived from traditional testing.

EPA's Risk Assessment Support Division is developing and applying high throughput test methods in which small aquatic organisms (e.g., embryo-larval fish, crustaceans, insect larva, aquatic plants and algae) are exposed to test chemicals. To further the interpretation of the results, you may also be engaged in literature review and hypothesis-driven studies that help establish causal relationships between perturbation of biological systems at the molecular and cellular level and adverse effects on individuals and/or populations.

• Conducting laboratory exposures to organic chemicals using aquatic organisms including fish, invertebrates, and algae.
• Extracting biomolecules including DNA, RNA, endogenous metabolites, etc. from animal and plant tissues.
• Conducting molecular, biochemical, physiological, and/or histological analyses on biofluids and tissue samples collected from aquatic organisms.
• Screening chemicals or chemical mixtures for biological activity using a diversity of cell-free, cell-based, and/or high throughput testing approaches.
• Applying computational pipelines, bioinformatic approaches, statistical analyses, and quality assurance/quality control principles to complex biological data sets including those from "omics" technologies.
• Compiling and summarizing scientific information from the peer-reviewed literature and from on-line data sources.
• Conducting critical weight of evidence-based evaluations based on Bradford Hill considerations.
• Analyzing experimental data and generating tables, figures, and other summaries of results.
• Presenting research results at scientific meetings and contributing to peer-reviewed publications.

• Learn a diversity of laboratory techniques which can be applied across life sciences research fields.
• Learn to…