David H. Wegman (Chair) is the dean of the School of Health and Environment and founding chair of the Department of Work Environment in the Engineering College at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. He is board certified in preventive medicine (occupational medicine). His research has focused on epidemiological studies of occupational disease, musculoskeletal disorders, and cancer; developing methods to study subjective outcomes, such as musculoskeletal and respiratory or irritant symptoms reports; and health and safety needs of older workers. At the National Research Council, he chaired the Committee on Health and Safety Implications of Child Labor and was a member of the Panel on Musculoskeletal Disorders and the Workplace; the Committee on Gender Differences in Susceptibility to Environmental Factors: A Priority Assessment; the Committee to Review the Health Consequences of Service During the Persian Gulf War; and the Committee on the Role of the Primary Care Physician in Occupational/Environmental Medicine. He has M.Sc. and M.D. degrees from Harvard University.
Richard V. Burkhauser is chair of the Department of Policy Analysis and Management and Sarah Gibson Blanding Professor of Policy Analysis in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University. His current research interests focus on the importance of social environment on the work outcomes of people with disabilities; how disability influences economic well-being; how Social Security reforms will affect the work and economic well-being of older persons; and on cross-national comparisons of the economic
well-being and work of older persons. He is a member of the Panel Study on Income Dynamics board of overseers and the editorial boards of The Gerontologist, The Journal of Disability Policy Studies, The Review of Income and Wealth, Labor Economics, Research on Aging, and The Journal of Applied Social Science Studies. He was a member of the technical panel of the 1994–1996 Advisory Council on Social Security and the 1994–1996 National Academy of Social Insurance Panel on Disability Policy Reform. At the National Research Council, he served on the Committee on Disability Determination for Individuals with Visual Impairments and is currently a member of the Panel on a Research Agenda and New Data for an Aging World. He has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago.
Gary Burtless is a senior fellow and holds the John C. and Nancy D. Whitehead Chair in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution. Previously, he served as an economist in the policy and evaluation offices of the secretary of labor and the secretary of health, education, and welfare. His recent research has focused on sources of growing wage and income inequality in the United States, the influence of international trade on income inequality, the job market prospects of public aid recipients, reform of social insurance in developing countries and formerly socialist economies, and the implications of privatizing the American social security system. He is coauthor or editor of numerous books, including Can America Afford to Grow Old? Paying for Social Security (1989), and editor of and contributor to Aging Societies: The Global Dimension (1998); Work Health and Income Among the Elderly (1987); and Retirement and Economic Behavior (1984). He has a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Neil Charness is professor of psychology at the Florida State University and a research associate at the Pepper Institute on Aging and Public Policy. His current research interests focus on the topics of human factors in computer use by older adults and on age and expert performance. He has published numerous journal articles and book chapters, and was editor of Aging and Human Performance (1985) and coeditor of Gerontechnology: A Sustainable Investment in the Future (1998) and Communication, Technology and Aging: Opportunities and Challenges for the Future (2001). He is a fellow of the Canadian Psychological Association, the American Psychological Association (Division 20), the American Psychological Society, and the Gerontological Society of America. He has M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Carnegie Mellon University.
Paul A. Landsbergis is an epidemiologist and associate professor in the Department of Community and Preventive Medicine (Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine) and in the Department of Medicine
(cardiology) at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. His areas of research interest include occupational health and safety, occupational stress, ergonomics, psychosocial factors, new systems of work organization, and socioeconomic status and cardiovascular disease. He is a coeditor of the first textbook on work-related cardiovascular disease and a coinvestigator of the Work Site Blood Pressure Study in New York City. He is currently principal investigator of a study of work organization, work stress, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease among auto workers funded by the DaimlerChrysler–United Auto Workers Health and Safety Fund, and a study of the impact of extended work schedules on risk of work-related musculoskeletal disorders, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease funded by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). He has a Ph.D. from Columbia University School of Public Health.
Charles Levenstein is professor of work environment policy at University of Massachusetts, Lowell. He is the author or coauthor of a number of books and has published many articles in refereed journals concerning occupational and environmental policy in the United States and abroad. He is editor of New Solutions: Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health Policy. He is a codirector of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute– University of Massachussetts Lowell Consortium on organized labor and tobacco control, recently funded by the American Legacy Foundation, and is also codirector of the WHO/PAHO collaborating center in occupational health at the University of Massachussetts, Lowell. He has a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Michael Marmot is professor of epidemiology and public health and director of the International Centre for Health and Society at University College London. He is also adjunct professor of health and social behavior at the Harvard School of Public Health. He has coordinated two European research networks and is now co-coordinator of the European Science Foundation Network on Inequalities in Healthy Life Expectancy. He has been a member of two research networks of the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation, and a member of the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research Population Research program. He also chaired the Ontario Institute for Work and Health Research Advisory Committee and is a member of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. At the National Research Council, he is a member of the Panel on a Research Agenda and New Data for an Aging World. He has an M.D. from the University of Sydney and a Ph.D. in epidemiology from the University of California, Berkeley.
James P. McGee (Study Director) has been a senior project officer at the National Research Council since 1994, supporting projects in the areas of
applied psychology, engineering, and education. In addition to directing the Committee on the Health and Safety Needs of Older Workers, he directs the Board on Assessment of NIST Programs, for the Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences, and the Panels on Operational Testing and Evaluation of the Stryker Vehicle and on Assessing the Scientists and Engineers Statistical Data System, for the Committee on National Statistics. He has also served as staff officer for projects on musculoskeletal disorders and the workplace, the changing nature of work, the susceptibility of older persons to environmental hazards, and educational needs of people with autism, all for the Board on Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sensory Sciences. He also directs the Army Research Laboratory Technical Assessment Board. Prior to joining the NRC, he held technical and management positions as an applied psychologist at IBM, General Electric, RCA, General Dynamics, and Sikorsky Aircraft corporations. He has B.A. from Princeton University and a Ph.D. from Fordham University, both in psychology.
Carolyn Emerson Needleman is a professor in the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research at Bryn Mawr College, where she teaches courses in social policy and research. She has served as the director of Bryn Mawr’s social work doctoral program and heads the school’s doctoral concentration in occupational and environmental health. She has written widely in the areas of public health, risk communication, occupational safety and health, environmental health, and community development. She has headed a number of community-based research projects dealing with occupational and environmental health and has more than 20 years of experience with program development and evaluation in a wide variety of health and human service programs serving low-income and minority populations. She has a Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis.
Timothy A. Salthouse is Brown-Forman Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia. Previously he was professor of psychology at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and regents professor of psychology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, and the Gerontological Society of America and a member of the Psychonomic Society. He was a recipient of the APA Division 20 Distinguished Contribution Award in 1995, and was named an APS William James Fellow in 1998. At the National Research Council, he was a member of the Panel on Human Factors Research Needs for an Aging Population and on the Panel on Future Directions for Cognitive Research on Aging. He has a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of Michigan.
Michael Silverstein is assistant director for industrial safety and health with the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries, a job that includes responsibility for the state’s occupational safety and health program. In the early 1990s he spent two years in Washington, DC, as director of policy for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and returned to Washington state in 1995. Prior to these government positions, he was assistant director for the Occupational Health and Safety Department of the United Auto Workers Union in Detroit, Michigan. Board-certified as a specialist in occupational medicine, he has also practiced family medicine and occupational medicine in Michigan and California. At the National Research Council, he was a member of the Committee on Health and Safety Implications of Child Labor. He has an M.D. from Stanford Medical School and an M.P.H. from the University of Michigan.
Glorian Sorensen is director of the Dana-Farber Center for CommunityBased Research and professor of health and social behavior at the Harvard School of Public Health. Her research has focused on identifying effective means to address disparities in cancer prevention and control by socioeconomic status, social class, and race/ethnicity, with the aim of developing innovative intervention methodologies that are relevant to the needs of these diverse populations. She has conducted a broad spectrum of worksite intervention studies testing the efficacy of cancer prevention methods for low-income and blue-collar workers. She has also studied the role of labor unions in tobacco control efforts. In addition, she has provided a voice for the role of community and worksite-based research in understanding the influence of social and environmental influences on cancer risk. At the Institute of Medicine, she was a member of the Committee on Capitalizing on Social Science and Behavioral Research to Improve the Public’s Health and is currently a member of the Committee for Behavior Change in the 21st Century. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.
Emily A. Spieler is dean and Edwin Hadley Professor of Law at the Northeastern University School of Law. She has written and spoken extensively on issues related to occupational safety and health, employment and disability law, and workers’ compensation. She currently also serves as a member of the Workers’ Compensation Steering Committee for the National Academy of Social Insurance and as a member of the Social and Economic Consequences of Workplace Illness and Injury Implementation Team for the National Occupational Research Agenda of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. She has a J.D. from Yale Law School.
Robert B. Wallace is professor of epidemiology and internal medicine at the University of Iowa Colleges of Public Health and Medicine, as well as interim director of the University’s Center on Aging. His research interests concern the causes and prevention of disabling conditions of older persons. He has had substantial experience in the conduct of both observational cohort studies of older persons and clinical trials, including preventive interventions related to osteoporotic fracture and coronary disease prevention. He is the principal site investigator for the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI), a national intervention trial exploring the prevention of breast and colon cancer and coronary disease. A member of the Institute of Medicine, he has served on many study committees and is currently chair of its health promotion and disease prevention board. He is a senior advisor to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force and has served on the executive committee of the Association of Teachers of Preventive Medicine and chaired the epidemiology section of the American Public Health Association. He has an M.D. from Northwestern University.
Craig Zwerling is a professor in the departments of Occupational and Environmental Health, Epidemiology, and Internal Medicine at the University of Iowa. He is head of the Department of Occupational and Environmental Health in the University of Iowa College of Public Health and directs the University’s Injury Prevention Research Center. His research has included studies of occupational injuries among workers with disabilities. He is currently studying workplace accommodations for workers with disabilities and their effect in reducing occupational injury rates. At the Institute of Medicine, he served on the Committee on Injury Prevention and Control. He has an M.D. from Case Western Reserve University and M.P.H. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University.