STAC Welcomes New Co-Chairs

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Savitz and Sonnenfeld Appointed Council Co-Chairs

Leaders from business, industry, government and medicine recently joined Governor Lincoln D. Chafee and members of the Rhode Island Science & Technology Advisory Council (STAC) to welcome David Savitz, Vice President of Research at Brown University and Gerald Sonnenfeld, Vice President of Research and Economic Development at the University of Rhode Island, as the newly-appointed Council co-chairs.

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Savitz originally came to Brown’s School of Public Health in 2010 and has served as a professor of obstetrics and gynecology in the Alpert Medical School and associate director for perinatal research at Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island. His epidemiological research has extended to many important public health issues including toxins in the workplace, the environmental effects of oil shale extraction, childhood obesity, pesticides and breast cancer, pregnancy risks from environmental toxins, drinking water standards and safety, ethnicity and birth outcomes. On one occasion, his research brought him suddenly to CNN’s attention: A paper he co-authored about risks faced by Spanish workers who clean up oil spills appeared in Annals of Internal Medicine after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Before coming to Brown, Savitz held positions at the University of Pittsburgh, University of Colorado School of Medicine, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. A member of the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine, he is the author of nearly 350 papers in professional journals and editor or author of three books on environmental epidemiology.

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Sonnenfeld comes to the University of Rhode Island from Clemson University. Sonnenfeld joined Clemson University as vice president for research and professor of biological sciences in 2010. During his tenure he led the initiative to establish a healthcare research powerhouse for both the university and the Greenville Health System. In 2012 he was named vice president of what became the Clemson University School of Health Research and chief science officer of the Greenville Health System.

During his career, Sonnenfeld has been awarded more than $14 million in federal research grants and holds two U.S. patents and one from Canada. His research has focused on the effects of stress on the immune system and resistance to cancer and infection. He was one of the early researchers on the role of interferon-gamma in regulating immune responses. He has directed multiple pre-clinical studies and has been involved in clinical study development for several immunoregulatory agents. Sonnenfeld has also conducted experiments on the U.S. Space Shuttle and on Russian space program satellites.

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Before joining Clemson, Sonnenfeld held positions at Binghamton University, State University of New York, the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, and the University of Louisville School of Medicine.

A native New Yorker, Sonnenfeld is the author of more than 140 peer-reviewed scientific articles and has written numerous articles and edited two books. He is associate editor of the Journal of Interferon and Cytokine Research and a member of the editorial board of the Immunological Journal and the Journal of Gravitational Physiology.