I am teaching 3 courses:

PUBHLTH 666-01: Environmental & Occupational Toxicology  I

This course is designed to teach fundamentals of toxicology with an emphasis on environmental and occupational toxicology. Topics discussed include: mechanisms of toxicity, absorption, metabolism, distribution and excretion of xenobiotics, toxicokinetics, molecular mechanisms of toxic response, and toxicity testing methods. In this class, each student chooses one environmental or occupational toxin and prepares a literature review of this toxin over the course of the semester following the logics of the course syllabus. Each class period normally consists of 2 parts. The first part is a lecture presenting a new topic. During the second part, students discuss their progress in work on individual projects. Given that this course covers fundamentals of toxicology it is useful for anybody interested in environmental and occupational health, food and drug safety.

PUBHLTH 667-01: Environmental & Occupational Toxicology II

In 2007, the National Academy of Sciences published a document “Toxicity Testing in the 21 Century: a Vision and a Strategy” (Tox21) which analyzed the existing crisis in toxicity testing methods and approaches and outlined future directions of development. In short, drawbacks of the current methods are: (1) a lot of animals are needed to test the toxicity of each substance, which raises concerns from ethical standpoints, is expensive and time consuming; (2) only final (apical) health endpoints of toxicity are revealed in these tests and underlying mechanisms remain unknown; (3) there is an uncertainty in data transfer from animals to humans. The idea of future toxicology methods outlined in Tox21 is to switch to high throughput, computational methods, with limited use of animals, use of in vivo assays to test specific pathways, and extensive use of in silico modeling. Thus, it is evident that toxicologists of the future need to master a different toolbox of methods than today’s specialists. This course is developed to meet this upcoming demand for a new generation of toxicologists. In this class students will learn about new methods and approaches and will complete a laboratory project based on next generation sequencing starting from tissues of exposed and control animals through bioinformatic analysis of molecular pathways that were affected by exposure and generation of toxicity assessment data.

PUBHLTH 390AS: Introduction to Food Toxicology

The course is designed to teach fundamentals of toxicology with an emphasis on food toxicology. Topics to be discussed include: dose-response relationships, major groups of food toxins, mechanisms of toxicity, absorption, metabolism, distribution and excretion of food toxins, risks of use of genetically modified organisms as a source of food, sources of toxins and, toxicity testing methods and risk assessment. Lectures are enriched with examples illustrating the important role of food toxins and food poisoning in human history. Starting fall 2017 this course will include laboratory component.