An NRC committee will develop a long-range vision for exposure science and a strategy with goals and objectives for implementing the vision over the next twenty years. It will include development of a unifying conceptual framework for advancement of exposure science to study and assess human and ecological contact with chemical, biological, and physical stressors in their environments. In developing the vision and strategy, the committee will consider exposure assessment guidelines and practices used by EPA and other federal agencies, the use and development of advanced knowledge and analytic tools, and ways of incorporating more complete understanding of exposure into risk assessment, risk management, and other applications for human health and ecological services. The study will focus on the continuum comprising sources of stressors, their fate in or changes to the environment, human and ecologic exposure, and resulting doses or other relevant metrics that are relevant to outcomes of concern. The committee's report will be a potential companion document to previous NRC reports such as Toxicity Testing in the 21st Century: A Vision and a Strategy and Science and Decisions: Advancing Risk Assessment.

Specific issues may include, but are not limited to:

• Factors affecting relationships among stressors (chemical, biological, and physical) and exposed organisms along the continuum from sources to doses in humans, including susceptible individuals or populations, and from sources to ecosystems,

• Innovative approaches for characterizing aggregate and cumulative exposure from variable mixtures of stressors occurring via multiple pathways.

• Enhancing the predictive and diagnostic modeling (including probabilistic modeling) of exposure science so as to reduce uncertainties in risk assessment, risk management, and assessment of mitigation effectiveness.

• Developing or improving measurement and monitoring methods and interpretative tools (e.g., informatics) to provide data fundamental to exposure science.

• Exposure metrics (based on prediction and diagnosis) and exposure indicators (based on observations) for assessing the effectiveness of risk management and other decision making,

• Approaches to increase the usefulness of data from biomonitoring or environmental monitoring in developing risk assessments and related public policies,

• Identification of exposure aspects among humans and other organisms that do not readily lend themselves to inclusion in a unifying conceptual framework for exposure science,

• Key research and development needs for advancing exposure science,

• Educational approaches for training future exposure scientists, and

• Communication approaches for informing policy-makers and others about exposure-related information.