Daniel Schlenk, a professor of aquatic ecotoxicology and environmental toxicology in UC Riverside's Department of Environmental Sciences, has been appointed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) Scientific Advisory Panel for a three-year term, beginning this month.

Trained in human and ecotoxicology, Schlenk will lend the panel his expertise to better evaluate the safety of pesticides. In particular, his research interests focus on the fate and effects of pesticides in aquatic organisms.

Created in the mid-1970s to evaluate the safety of pesticides on humans and the environment, the seven-member FIFRA Scientific Advisory Panel provides comments, evaluations, and recommendations on pesticides and pesticide-related issues pertaining to the impact of regulatory actions on health and the environment. It meets approximately eight times a year.

In the coming weeks, the panel will evaluate methods currently being used to determine worker occupational exposure to pesticides. It also will evaluate experiments to determine if pesticides have an adverse effect on the developing fetus.

Schlenk, who joined UCR in 2000, has served on various scientific panels, including proposal review panels for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Institutes of Health. His honors include appointment as co-editor-in-chief for the international journal Aquatic Toxicology and two fellowships from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

Schlenk also has had appointments as a Ray Lankester Fellow at the United Kingdom’s Marine Biological Association and as a visiting scholar at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, Sydney, Australia; the Department of Biochemistry at the Chinese University of Hong Kong; and the Instituto Del Mare, Italy.