The North Atlantic Chapter of the Society of Environmental Toxicology & Chemistry held its annual meeting June 10-12 in Freeport, ME. A short course on communicating environmental risk was held on June 10 led by David Ropeik, author of How Risky is it, Really?, and a consultant in risk communication. Day 1 of the meeting featured a session on research translation and community engagement organized and led by Celia Chen, Ph.D., with a presentation by Laurie Rardin on the challenges of communicating arsenic risk to private well owners in NH. 

Marcella Thompson of the Brown SRP also presented on the role of the knowledge broker in building community capacity using GIS technology and Sarah Nelson from U Maine spoke about the dragonfly mercury project and the ways in which citizen scientists contribute to national-scale research at national parks. Over 80 people attended the meeting.

During the meeting we also ran into Jim Rice, Ph.D., former Government Liaison for the Brown SRP Research Translation Core, who is now an Environmental Scientist at Gradient. We were happy to have a chance to catch up with him and discuss relevant issues.