Risk Policy and Law
The Risk Policy and Law (RP&L) Specialty Group of the Society for Risk Analysis is a group of scientists, social scientists, lawyers, engineers, and others interested in the interface between risk analysis, public policy, and laws. The RP&L Specialty Group was formerly called the “Risk, Science & Law” Specialty Group; it changed its name in 2006. The group’s goal is to support collaborative research and dialogue to identify and illuminate issues that arise from risk-related legislative acts, regulatory rules, treaties, oversight and review mechanisms, judicial proceedings, and other legal institutions.
The Risk, Policy and Law Specialty Group had a business meeting on December 9th, 2004 at the Society for Risk Analysis annual meeting. Our financial position is $8164. We supported the development of two sessions at the annual meeting but only one was accepted. The officers elected for 2025 were:
- Michael Dourson of Toxicology Excellence for Risk Assessment for Chair,
- Jacob Traverse of Center for Truth in Science for Vice Chair,
- Andrew Fox for Secretary/Treasurer,
- and an open position for student representative and councilor. The latter two positions will be filled at subsequent zoom meetings of the membership.
We had the good fortune to have our student award winner, Ms. Megan C. Marcellin (pictured below), who is a PhD Student in Systems Engineering at the University of Virginia, give an overview of her winner abstract entitled “AI & synthetic biology convergence: adaptive governance principles for balancing opportunities and threats”. Dr. Roger McClellen, an esteemed colleague for many of us, also gave us a briefing on issues associated with the formaldehyde peer review in the Environmental Protection Agency.
Next year’s activities were also discussed, a list in no particular order of which is shown below:
- Briefing US congressional staffers on Capital Hill
- TSCA origins and where we are today
- Joint proposal with the Applied Risk Management Specialty Group entitled “Entangling or Disentangling: How to Improve the Interface Between Risk Assessment and Risk Management”
- Addressing Chemophobia
- Other ideas are welcome!
