Webinar Wednesdays from the Environmental Leadership Project

Posted by on July 27, 2009

Webinar Wednesdays from the Environmental Leadership Project

August Webinars

Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Sabrina McCormick, Ph.D.
Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar
University of Pennsylvania

Webinars are free and open to the public!

About the Webinar
No Family History presents compelling evidence of environmental links to breast cancer, ranging from everyday cosmetics to industrial waste. Sabrina McCormick weaves the story of one survivor with no family history into a powerful exploration of the big business of breast cancer. As drugs, pink products, and corporate sponsorships generate enormous revenue to find a cure, a growing number of experts argue that we should instead increase focus on prevention–reducing environmental exposures that have contributed to the sharp increase of breast cancer rates.

Title: No Family History
Date: Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Time: 12:00pm – 1:00pm EST
Register here: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/269239658

About the Speaker
Sabrina McCormick is a sociologist and documentary filmmaker. Her areas of expertise are in environmental and medical sociology, science and technology studies, and social movements. She has previously been funded by Brown University, the Henry Luce Foundation, and the Environmental Leadership Program for her work on breast cancer and the environment. She is widely published and her previous documentary film work has been shown in multiple festivals in the United States. Dr. McCormick will release a book with the film entitled, No Family History: The Environmental Links to Breast Cancer (Rowman & Littlefield), which explores the conflicts and controversies over breast cancer causation. Dr. McCormick is currently a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania.

Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Nithya Ramanathan, Ph.D.
Post-doctoral Fellow
Center for Embedded Networked Sensing
University of California – Los Angeles

About the Webinar
Nithya will give a general overview of wireless sensor networks as applied to environmental monitoring, with a focus on soil and groundwater sensing. She will provide some practical strategies and considerations for deciding if its worth the effort to deploy a wireless sensing system. Some factors to consider include cost, radio signal propagation characteristics of the environment, and achievable data quality with low-power hardware. Throughout, she’ll use examples and data from a number of real-world deployments she has undertaken to monitor soil and groundwater systems, and discuss some of the solutions that have been developed to address these design challenges.

Title:  What’s the hype about Wireless Sensor Networks? (And is it really worth it?)
Date:   Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Time:   12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EST

About the Speaker
Nithya Ramanathan is a post-doctoral research fellow in computer science at the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing at UCLA, and founder of Lorax Analytics. Her areas of expertise are in the design and deployment of data collection systems for environmental and health assessments. She has received funding from Google, the National Science Foundation, and the Switzer Fellows Program, for her work in applying wireless sensing systems to the study of soil and groundwater systems. Dr. Ramanathan’s PhD work contributed to key advances in understanding arsenic contamination in Bangladesh. She has co-authored two reports released by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, including Distributed Sensing Systems for Water Quality Assessment and Management, and a book chapter, which explore practical challenges and solutions to deploying wireless sensing systems.

About the Environmental Leadership Program

The mission of the Environmental Leadership Program (ELP) is to inspire visionary, action-oriented, and diverse leadership for a just and sustainable future.  ELP is shaping an environmental movement characterized by diversity, innovation, dialogue, and collaboration.  If you would like to find out more about our programming, please click here to visit our website.

http://www.elpnet.org/