Visiting scholar's topic: food safety

Dr. David O. Carpenter, professor at the Environmental Health and Toxicology Division, School of Public Health at the University at Albany, will give a talk titled ?Is the seafood you eat safe?? Thursday, Dec. 6, at Skidmore. The discussion will begin at 11:10 a.m. in Emerson Auditorium of Palamountain Hall and is open without charge to the public.

Carpenter is returning to Skidmore at the invitation of Cathy Domozych, senior teaching associate in biology. For several years, Carpenter, who is widely known for his research on environmental toxins, has been a popular guest lecturer for Skidmore students. This year, Domozych?s class on Marine Biology, as well as students in Monica Raveret-Richter?s Ecology course, will hear Carpenter. Domozych recently explained, "We ask him back each fall to jointly address our marine bio and ecology (and some freshman seminar students this year) because his message is intended for a wide audience and directly impacts all of them as consumers. His work is also very relevant to our discussions on pollution and overfishing and helps tie together a lot of what we have been teaching for the entire semester. He is an engaging speaker as well."

Carpenter's latest research on contaminants in farmed salmon appears in a paper titled ?PCBs, PCDD/Fs, and Organochlorine Pesticides in Farmed Atlantic Salmon from Maine, Eastern Canada and Norway, and Wild Salmon from Alaska,? with co-authors Susan D. Shaw, Diane Brenner, Michelle L. Berger, Chia-Swee Hong, and Kurunthachalam Kannan. Earlier this year, his work appeared was cited in an article titled ?Salmon Safety,? published in Science Journal online.

Carpenter is well known in the field and this area both for his work on the faculty of the University at Albany's School of Public Health and for his prior service as a host of the "Health Show," which airs on WAMC-FM. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice and International Journal of Occupational Medicine and Environmental Health.

A graduate of Harvard Medical School, Carpenter is a specialist in neuronal thermosensitivity, neurotoxicology, and neural basis of human disease.