An ad hoc committee will organize and convene a workshop to consider questions about environmental and occupational exposures of military personnel that have the potential to be addressed by research using specimens in biorepositories. Potential questions for the workshop include:

• How could biorepositories be used to reconstruct past exposure, either incident related or longitudinally based on repeated deployments and potential exposures over time?
• Is there biological monitoring technology that can be used for detecting chemicals to support longitudinal studies (such as pre-deployment and post-deployment)? If so, how could the specimens from biorepositories be used to validate exposures to such chemicals?
• How can genomic technologies be used to identify troops who had an exposure of interest?
• Are there additional biospecimens the DoD should consider collecting to answer exposure questions?

The workshop will consider the types of specimens available in the Department of Defense's biorepositories, and the feasibility of using the existing collections for research to answer questions about environmental exposures. Brief proceedings of the workshop will be written by a designated rapporteur in accordance with institutional guidelines.