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Dennis J. Paustenbach is an American scientist, businessman, researcher, and author. He is a widely recognized expert in industrial hygiene, occupational disease, toxicology, environmental pollution, and risk assessment. He spent ten years working for the private sector and the remainder of his career as a consultant in occupational and environmental health. He was President and CEO of McLaren-Hart Environmental Engineering at age 40. Later, he was a Group Vice-President of Exponent. He is the founder and former president of Chemrisk, a consulting firm specializing in the use of toxicology and risk assessment to characterize the hazards of chemicals in soil, air, water, food, sediments and consumer products.

Paustenbach has given expert testimony in many courts regarding the health hazards posed by dioxins, asbestos, benzene, chromium, beryllium, cobalt, chlorinated solvents, and other chemicals. He has published nearly 300 peer reviewed papers in scientific journals, about 50 book chapters, and has presented nearly 350 papers at various scientific conferences during his career. He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Purdue University in 2006 and a Doctor of Engineering from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in 2007. More recently, Paustenbach has become active in philanthropy.

Early life and education
Paustenbach was born in Tarentum, Pennsylvania. He left his hometown after first grade and moved to Akron, Ohio, where he attended St. Matthews. His family later moved to Strasburg, Ohio, which was in a rural setting adjacent to many Amish communities, where he attended high school.

In 1974, Paustenbach graduated from the Rose Polytechnic Institute with a BS in Chemical Engineering and joined Eli Lilly and Company. After working Eli Lilly for two years as a process engineer, he felt that he wanted to study further. He left his job and enrolled at University of Michigan for an MS in Industrial Hygiene and Toxicology, which he completed in 1977. He later earned a PhD in environmental toxicology from Purdue University in 1982.[5] While studying for his PhD, he founded the founded the undergraduate/graduate programs in industrial hygiene at Purdue. He also taught all four of the industrial hygiene courses.

Paustenbach did post-doctoral research at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in physiologically-based pharmacokinetics (PB-PK) under Dr. Melvin Anderson. This work resulted in two publications that involved the early application of PB-PK. He served as a Visiting Scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health’s Center for Risk Analysis in 1997 under the direction of John Graham.

Career
Paustenbach’s career is notable for his many contributions to the literature in a broad array of fields: engineering, toxicology, industrial hygiene, exposure assessment and risk assessment. Paustenbach twice started the environmental consulting firm ChemRisk. The firm applied the principles of health risk assessment to quantitatively characterize the risk of chemicals in foods, water, air, sediment, soil, and consumer products. In the interest of advancing science, the firm played a leadership role in creating the practice of sharing as much of its work as possible through the peer reviewed literature.

Prior to about 1985, it was uncommon for firms (industrial or consulting) to share their work in scientific journals. Paustenbach, while employed by the private sector, believed that it was an obligation of the regulated community to share its research, rather than to allow these research efforts to remain in file cabinets. He believed that firms were, in the vast number of situations, not reducing their competitive edge by sharing this information. He has been acknowledged as one of the persons who, through encouraging hundreds of scientists to publish corporately funded research, helped advance the environmental sciences.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Paustenbach conducted considerable research into the dioxins and furans. Among his first major undertakings was determining the health hazards posed by dioxin contaminated soil including the site in Times Beach, Missouri. In the 1990s, he conducted research evaluating the hazards posed by occupational exposure to pharmaceuticals, benzene, berylllium,. Also, in the 1990s, he published many studies which evaluated the exposure and health hazards associated with exposure to hexavalent chromium. From about 2000 to 2018, he conducted risk assessments on as many as 100 exposure scenarios including asbestos exposure of auto mechanics, benzene exposure in refineries, lead in consumer products, arsenic in wine, perfluorinated chemical in groundwater, MCHM in drinking water, the hydrocarbons in drinking water, and   Paustenbach and colleagues developed some of the earliest multi-pathway exposure and risk assessments on various chemicals. Later, he conducted considerable research involving cobalt release from medical devices, Over the years, Paustenbach has served as an adjunct professor at six universities. Specifically, University of Texas (Houston), Purdue University, University of Bridgeport, University of Massachusetts (Amherst), University of California, Irvine School of Medicine (clinical professor of Occupational Medicine), and University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), where he gave two lectures in risk assessment nearly once a month for about seven years.

Books
Two textbooks he authored/edited, The Risk Assessment of Environmental and Human Health Hazards: A Textbook of Case Studies (1989) and Human and Ecological Risk Assessment: Theory and Practice (2002).

Science Advisory Panels

 * 2008-2014: Served on the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) Board of Scientific Counselors (BOSC) Executive committee, which has oversight for the research programs at the USEPA (ORD).
 * 2004-2007: Member of USEPA BOSC to review the quality of the US EPA cancer research programs at their National Center for Research (Research Triangle Park, NC).
 * 2002-2006: Appointed by Secretary Tommy Thompson (Human Health Services) to serve as a Member of Advisory Committee to the Director, National Center for Environmental Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
 * 2002: Member of Vietnam United States Scientific Delegation on Human Health and Environmental Effects of Agent Orange/Dioxin (March 3-6; Hanoi, Vietnam). This was a group assembled by Senator Tom Daschle.
 * 2002: Member of US EPA-sponsored Science Advisory Panel to address the health risks of dusts in buildings near the World Trade Center (Oct 21-22; New York, NY).
 * 2000-2001: Member of the US EPA Science Advisory Board that evaluated the “EPA Reassessment” of dioxin and dioxin-like compounds (Washington, DC). Chaired by Dr. Mort Lippmann. The work spanned both the Clinton and Bush administrations.

Awards and Honors

 * 1992 - Howrard Kusnetz Award
 * 1997 - Outstanding Risk Practitioner by the Society for Risk Analysis
 * 2002 - Arnold Lehman Award by Society of Toxicology
 * 2010 - Henry Smyth Award for Contributions in Toxicology by American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists
 * 2009 - Fellow of the American Industrial Hygiene Association
 * 2010 - Ed Baier Award by the American Industrial Hygiene Association
 * 2012 - Fellow of the Society for Risk Analysis
 * 2015 - Outstanding graduate of the School of Health Sciences.