Jessica Nelson, a doctoral candidate in the BU SPH Environmental Health Department, and Madeleine Scammell, PI of the Community Outreach and Research Translation Cores, presented at a workshop focusing on translating data from emerging technologies to better inform public health decision making. The workshop, Connecting Innovations in Biological Exposure and Risk Sciences: Better Information for Better Decisions, was convened in Charleston, SC on June 16 and 17. Sponsored by the International Council of Chemical Associations, workshop participants from industry, academia and government assessed the growing gap between advancements in new technologies to measure the effects of chemicals on cells, tissues and organisms and the scientific community’s capacity to translate the data from these new technologies into information that is effective and useful for risk-based decision making.

Nelson and Scammell presented on the Boston Consensus Conference on Biomonitoring, organized by the BU School of Public Health in 2006 with funding from NIEHS. The Danish-style conference brought together leading experts in biomonitoring and a 15-member lay panel representing a cross-section of Boston area residents. The lay panel produced a consensus statement expressing the panel’s ethical concerns and policy recommendations regarding human biomonitoring. Nelson and Scammell showed a video made about the consensus conference, then highlighted the recommendations of the lay panel and emphasized the essential nature of community involvement in public health policy making.

At the request of Community Outreach Core partner Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility, BU SBRP Community Outreach Core staff held a web conference on the use of RSS feeds and wikis. Staff members from numerous chapters of Physicians for Social Responsibility attended the web conference held on June 2.

The RSS portion of the presentation focused on receiving feeds to stay informed and publishing feeds to reach stakeholders. RSS feeds can be used by non-profit organizations to monitor news and academic literature in their issue areas, identify potential funding opportunities, and identify collaborative opportunities with partner organizations. The benefits of publishing RSS feeds as an alternative to email alerts were discussed.

The wiki portion of the presentation focused on the use of private wikis for collaboration. Participants learned how to choose a wiki that fits their needs as well as strategies to promote the use of wikis among colleagues.

Please download the presentations below and This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it with any questions.

An introduction to RSS
Wiki basics: Using wikis to enhance collaboration

A new article by BU SBRP trainees Dmitri Beglov, Gwo-Yu Chuang, David Hall, and Bioinformatics Core PI Sandor Vajda has been published in Bioinformatics. The authors sought to develop computational methods to identify the most druggable pockets of target proteins. The location of these “hot spot” regions of proteins can be determined experimentally at considerable cost. The authors developed an algorithm that performs a global search of the entire protein surface for regions that bind a number of small organic probe molecules. Improving the efficiency of finding the most druggable pockets of target proteins and identifying molecular fragments or functional groups that tend to bind will have important benefits in the drug design process. The same technology is being used to identify protein sites that interact with known toxicophores and to determine the importance of such interactions with particular receptors.