Worker, Operator, Bystander and Resident Exposure and Risk Assessment

Emily Bryson is the supervisor over the Human Health Mitigation Programme in the California Department of Pesticide Regulation’s (DPR) Worker Health and Safety Branch. Emily founded and chairs DPR’s Emerging Technologies Workgroup, a collaborative effort between academia and government to gather information on emerging application technologies and build in-house subject matter expertise, and has represented California in US EPA’s Emerging Technologies Workgroup and Targeted Application Technologies Working Group. Emily also sits on the Remote Pilots’ and Aerial Applicators’ Association’s Advisory Board.

Neil A. Byron, is working as a Senior Managing Scientist in Exponent UK’s Health Sciences Center for Chemical Regulation and Food Safety. Prior to joining Exponent he was with the UK’s CRD for 18 years. He is a human exposure assessment specialist, having over 25 years of experience in exposure and risk assessment of PPP and is currently involved with the industry’s SeedTropex task Force who are developing a new exposure model for seed treatment.  

Agathi Charistou is a Regulatory Toxicologist in the Laboratory of Toxicological Control of Pesticides at the Benaki Phytopathological Institute in Greece with long experience in the evaluation of mammalian toxicology studies and non-dietary exposure assessment to both plant protection products and biocides.

Edward Chikwana has worked in human health risk assessment in various capacities over the past few years. In his current role at Corteva Agriscience, he works as a Global Human Health Risk Assessor within the Exposure, Risk & Epidemiology group, assisting with global registration of several plant protection products. He has experience with risk-based dietary and non-dietary human exposure assessments, including higher tier approaches, to support registration of plant protection products across various geographies. He serves on several multi-disciplinary industry-wide teams, such as CLI, CLE, and CARES NG , responsible for addressing techno-regulatory issues and developing technical positions in alignment with global regulatory requirements.

Fabiana Cremaschi Palma is a Pharmacist with a graduated in Biochemical Pharmacy and a degree in Biological Sciences. Since 2016, she has been the Technical and Administrative Director of the ProHuma Institute of Scientific Studies, working on the development of the institute and supporting the implementation of the assessment of non-dietary exposure to pesticides in Brazil and the development of a database to assess the risk of occupational exposure to pesticides.

Jean Paul Douzals is an Agricultural Engineer-with a PhD in Food Processing Sciences and he is the Head of the Spray Application Research Group at UMR ITAP INRAE Montpellier. His main research activities concern experimental developments for the comprehension of the spray application for plant protection and the definition of performance criteria for the optimisation of the process. Expected outcomes are the reduction of plant protection products doses, the definition of satisfying conditions for the development of bioproducts and biocontrol, the reduction of the impacts of spray applications such as spray drift. He is collaborating to several projects with LISAH and ECOSYS research teams aiming at developing an integrated model of PPP transfer in the environment.

Edgars Felkers is an occupational and residential safety expert at Bayer Crop Science Division in Germany. He is responsible for non-dietary human exposure and risk assessments of plant protection products. Currently, he is also chairing CropLife Europe Occupational and Bystander Technical SubGroup (CLE OBE TSG).

Gunnar Fent works at the Institute for Plant Protection of the State Education and Research Center of Viticulture, Horticulture and Rural Development (DLR-Rheinpfalz) in Germany. For several decades he has performed e-fate and environmental exposure studies with pesticides at different scales.

Felix M. Kluxen is a pharmacist and certified toxicologist and has been working as a Regulatory Toxicologist since 2013. His main interests are NAMs, statistics in toxicology and risk assessment. He is a member of several CropLife Europe teams and international project groups.

Sebastian König is a biotechnologist and chemist by training and works at the Swiss Federal Food Safety and Veterinary Office. He is experienced in the assessment of non-dietary exposure to plant protection products. He is also involved in research on drones in agriculture.

Alistair Morriss is a Global Human Health Risk Assessor at Corteva Agriscience in the UK. Prior to joining Corteva in 2023 he has been a Principal Consultant specialising in OPEX at Blue Frog Scientific based in the UK for 4 years and a Human Health Risk Assessor at Dow AgroSciences (now Corteva) for 8 years. Before joining Corteva and Blue Frog Scientific he worked in contract research organisations for 8 years.

Enrico Peter is a Biologist and has been working at the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) as a Scientist in the Department Pesticides Safety since 2019. He is responsible for the risk assessment for plant protection product (with emphasis on non-dietary risk assessment) and the evaluation of toxicological data on plant protection products.

Anugrah Shaw is a Professor at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore and has conducted research on protective clothing for pesticide applicators for three decades. She also serves as Director, International Center for PPE for Pesticide Operators and Re-entry Workers. Anugrah has provided leadership for the development of international standards on protective clothing for pesticide operators and is currently coordinating international initiatives on operator safety.

Adriana Torres de Sousa is a Health Regulation Expert of the Brazilian Health Regulation Agency (ANVISA) and, since 2017, she is manager of the Monitoring and Pesticide Risk Assessment Office, which is in charge of dietary and non-dietary health risk assessment of pesticide exposure, pesticide toxicological re-evaluation process and the Program on Pesticide Residue Analysis in Food (PARA). Adriana has been working for over 17 years on pesticide regulation. Adriana holds a Chemistry Degree, a Master’s degree in Inorganic Chemistry and a Postgraduate certificate in Toxicology Applied to Sanitary Surveillance.

Jens Karl Wegener has been Director and Professor of the Institute for Application Techniques in Plant Protection at Julius Kühn-Institute (JKI), since 2013. In 2017 he was appointed to be Honorary Professor at Technical University of Braunschweig, where he is supporting teachings of the Institute for Mobile Machinery and Commercial Vehicles (IMN). Furthermore he is conducting the interdisciplinary and university-covering block module \"Innovative Plant Protection Technologies\" together with students and instructors from five different Universities: His main focus is on optimisation and risk assessment of processes and procedures in agriculture. In this context he intensively studied the possibilities, limitations and benefits of new technologies for different agricultural purposes.

Christiane Wiemann is a veterinarian by training and works as a Principal Manager Toxicology / Human Risk Assessment Crop Protection at BASF. Starting her career as a toxicological study director she had have the focus on dermal absorption in vitro since then. Subsequently she became engaged in non-dietary risk assessment of plant protection products with meanwhile more than 20 years of experience. While her focus turned from toxicological hazard to non-dietary risk assessment she got engaged in several global and regional industry association and cross stakeholder working groups (CropLife, OECD, ICPPE) for non-dietary risk assessment and dermal absorption on the technical level bringing forward data generation, data collection, model and method development dedicated to the purpose of risk assessment improvement.