Feb 9, 2023: The 2022 Updates to the CDC Cancer Cluster Guidelines and how they motivate new research

Erik Svendsen, PhD, smiling and wearing a black suit

Erik R Svendsen, PhD

Director, Division of Environmental Health Science and Practice

National Center for Environmental Health, CDC

He / Him / His

Division of Environmental Health Science and Practice

The session will be about CDCs updates to our cancer cluster guidance that will be released soon. The goal will be to motivate academia to coordinate with public health officials to perform more quantitative assessments of cancer cluster alarms within communities where cancer cluster alarms are raised, and to motivate research across communities to better leverage statistical power to assess unusual patterns of cancer over larger geographies. We have developed better quantitative tools for assessing cancer clusters but the scientific capacity to use them varies widely within public health departments. Therefore, academic research centers could help fill that void to assist health departments with these types of investigations and to leverage their potential to learn more about the environmental risks factors for cancers.

About the Speaker: Dr. Erik Svendsen is the Division Director of Environmental Health Science and Practice (DEHSP) in CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health. Dr. Svendsen’s division is responsible for preventing exposures to environmental health hazards to improve the health of people in communities through applied environmental public health science and practice. DEHSP does this by detecting environmental health hazards, preventing harmful environmental exposures, reducing adverse health impacts from environmental factors, conducting applied research for environmental public health interventions, and responding to emerging environmental public health threats and disasters. Dr. Svendsen’s division brings scientists and practitioners together to create a cyclical process: the science conducted in this division directly informs practitioners’ work in the field, and that fieldwork identifies further scientific needs.

Dr. Svendsen received his PhD in Preventive Medicine and Environmental Health from the University of Iowa, where he completed doctoral studies in environmental epidemiology and exposure science with a special research focus on environmental lung diseases. After graduation, he completed a post-doctoral fellowship with the U.S. EPA in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Prior to assuming the position as Division Director at DEHSP and throughout the past two decades, Dr. Svendsen has consistently led multidisciplinary scientific teams. He served as an epidemiologist within the EPA, where he led air pollution research teams and served as a content matter expert for several national public health initiatives. Dr. Svendsen has been an advocate and international leader, consulting with the National Institute of Public Health in Japan for several years and supporting the recovery of communities impacted by the Fukushima nuclear disaster. He contributed to risk communication, environmental health tracking, food protection, and other public health recovery activities within the impacted regions. Those activities resulted in several co-authored scientific journal articles. He was the only non-Japanese researcher from the USA who authored or co-authored any of the journal articles within a special edition series focused on the state of the science marking the latest anniversary of the Fukushima disaster. His scientific leadership is further demonstrated by his role as a peer reviewer in several top-tier journals and as an Associate Editor for the respected BMC Public Health journal. Dr. Svendsen has also been a leader within public health practice and academia, when he led and managed the Division of Environmental Health at the Medical University of South Carolina, where he was also the environmental health crimes lead for the National Mass Violence Center. His work related to public health management and research on environmental health disasters has become well recognized, as exemplified when he was elected as the Chair of the Terrorism and Inhalation Disasters Section of the American Thoracic Society.


Thursday, February 9, 2023, 12:00-1:15 pm Eastern

*UPDATE 2/2/2023: This seminar will be presented via Zoom only (no in-person option).

Register HERE to receive the Zoom link and passcode. (registration is required)

Field Auditorium Room 1112, Grainger Hall (9 Circuit Dr, Durham, NC)

Masks are optional for in-person attendees. Please stay home if you aren’t feeling well and join us via livestream instead (see below).

Click HERE to join the livestream (no registration needed)!


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