Environmental Research Services

Biography
Robert Beach, PhD, specializes in the development and application of economic models to analyze agricultural, environmental, and natural resource regulations, programs, and policies. Research applications include studies evaluating the economic impacts of climate change on agriculture and forests, the potential for and economic impacts of agricultural mitigation of greenhouse gases for regions around the world, potential mitigation of black carbon and organic carbon emissions, farm household response to livestock disease prevention and control policies, risk management and crop insurance, policies to mitigate the impacts of natural disasters, and factors influencing forest investment and management. He has published his research in journals including the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural Economics, the American Journal of Public Health, Forest Policy and Economics, The Energy Journal, and Land Economics. Dr. Beach is also an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at North Carolina State University. Read More…

Biography
Michael Gallaher, PhD, is the director of RTI’s Technology, Energy, and the Environment Program and has over 10 years of experience leading projects for NIST, EPA, NSF, and NTIA and other federal agencies modeling the economic impact of new technologies. Dr. Gallaher specializes in developing baseline/counterfactual scenarios from which incremental costs and benefits can be measured, and he has conducted both retrospective and prospective technology assessments. His research has involved assessing the economic implications of technology adoption in the automotive, aerospace, computer hardware and software, chemical, iron and steel, and construction industries. Dr. Gallaher has led the review and redesign of national establishment-level surveys for NSF and EPA and has developed and implemented a wide range of survey methods, including in-person, telephone, mail, and Internet-based surveys. Read More…

Biography
Tyler Hartwell, Ph.D., a statistician, has been with RTI since 1964. He has extensive experience in designing large-scale clinical and behavioral trials, epidemiological multisite studies, and environmental exposure studies. Dr. Hartwell’s research areas include clinical and behavioral trials, international multisite trials, delivery and evaluation of community and worksite health intervention programs, and environmental issues. He has published widely on a variety of topics. He has been the principal or co-principal investigator on numerous large-scale studies and has managed a large group of statisticians. Read More…

Biography
George Van Houtven, PhD, specializes in the measurement of environmental, health, and natural resource values and the application of these measures to evaluate environmental and risk management policies. He has extensive experience in conducting original nonmarket valuation research, including the application of contingent valuation, conjoint analysis, averting behavior, and cost-of-illness methods. He also specializes in meta-regression analysis and other benefit transfer methods that synthesize results from existing research to support policy analysis. He has coordinated several interdisciplinary studies that link environmental and economic models and that apply benefit transfer approaches to support cost-benefit analyses of environmental regulations. He has also conducted research to examine the effectiveness of unit-based pricing policies for solid waste management, and he has analyzed the role of cost-benefit factors in environmental regulatory decision-making. His research has been published in several journals including the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Land Economics, and Environmental and Natural Resource Economics. Read More…

Biography
R.K.M. Jayanty, PhD, Senior Fellow in environmental analytical chemistry, appointed in December 2005, is a senior program director of environmental and industrial sciences. He has 40 years of experience in the field of environmental analytical chemistry, including significant program management and technical experience with complex multimedia sampling and analysis, chemical speciation, and method development/evaluation of programs for air toxics and fine particles. Dr. Jayanty’s technical experience includes methods development, evaluation, and field validation studies related to the measurement of toxic organics and fine particulates in ambient and source atmospheres. He is currently program manager of the chemical speciation of PM2.5 filter samples collected through nationwide network operations, and is an adjunct professor in the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, North Carolina State University. Dr. Jayanty is an internationally recognized scientist and the author of more than 150 technical papers, reports, and presentations. Read More…

Biography
F. Reed Johnson, PhD, Senior Fellow and principal economist, appointed March 2002, has over 35 years of academic and research experience in health and environmental economics. He has served on the faculty of several universities in the United States, Canada, and Sweden. As a staff member in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's environmental economics research program during the 1980s, Dr. Johnson helped pioneer the development of basic nonmarket valuation techniques. These techniques are now widely used for cost-benefit analysis in health and environmental economics. Dr. Johnson has over 80 publications in peer-reviewed journals and has coauthored a book on techniques for using existing environmental and health value estimates for policy analysis. His current research involves estimating general time equivalences among health states and patients' willingness to accept side-effect risks in return for therapeutic benefits. Read More…

Biography
Carol Mansfield, PhD, specializes in empirical analysis of individual decision making for management and policy applications related to the environment and health. She has estimated benefits for environmental and health projects using both revealed and stated preference techniques including hedonic pricing, travel cost, cost-of-illness, averting behavior, benefit transfer, meta-analysis, contingent value, and conjoint surveys. She has extensive experience with survey-based data collection for preference elicitation and exposure analysis, including instrument design, management, and statistical analysis of the responses. Dr. Mansfield has managed numerous multi-disciplinary teams researching environmental health and natural resource management policies. She is a member of the American Economic Association and the Association of Environmental and Natural Resource Economists, as well as an adjunct associate professor of economics at Duke University. Before joining RTI, Dr. Mansfield was an assistant professor in the Duke University Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences. Read More…

Biography
Edo D. Pellizzari, PhD, Senior Fellow in analytical and environmental health sciences, appointed April 2004, has 35 years of scientific leadership and accomplishment at RTI. He joined RTI in 1971 and served as vice president of Analytical and Chemical Sciences from 1983 to 2003. He is internationally known for major contributions in the environmental health sciences, specifically in chemical and aerosol exposure analysis, and for developing and applying personal exposure methodology to population-based studies on toxic chemicals. In 1989, Dr. Pellizzari helped charter the International Society for Exposure Analysis (ISEA) and established ISEA's Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology, for which he served as editor-in-chief for 15 years. Dr. Pellizzari is author or co-author of 191 peer-reviewed papers, 45 book chapters, 261 abstracts for national and international conferences, and over 100 reports. He has received California State University’s Distinguished Alumni and ISEA’s Wesolowski awards for achievements in environmental research. Read More…

Biography

Charles Rodes discusses his work in aerosol research

Charles E. Rodes, PhD, Senior Fellow in aerosol exposure, was appointed in July 2008 and leads the Aerosol Exposure Program at RTI. He has conducted health-based aerosol exposure research for federal and private clients since 1992. Previously, Dr. Rodes conducted aerosol technology and environmental exposure research for 23 years at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). He currently serves as the exposure expert on particulate matter for EPA's Board of Scientific Councilors and is leading grant research to develop asthma aerosol trigger sensors for the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). He also provides aerosol exposure guidance to the National Childrens Study, the U.S. Army (USACHPPM) for active duty soldiers, and for first responders as chair of an expert panel advising the Department of Homeland Security. He is a peer reviewer for five technical journals and the author of over 50 peer journal articles on aerosol exposure technologies.