The 2013 Spring Meeting of the North Carolina Regional Chapter of the Society of Toxicology was held on February 21, 2013, at the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (US EPA) research campus in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. The theme of the meeting was “Exposure: A Forgotten Part of Toxicology?” Approximately 150 local professionals and students attended this meeting.
Speakers at the meeting included Timothy Buckley (“Exposure Science in the 21st Century: Report by the National Research Council”) and Joachim Pleil (“Exploring the Human Exposome: Linking In Vivo Human Studies to In Vitro Toxicity Testing”) of the US EPA Environmental Protection Agency; David Balshaw (“The Exposome as a Bridge to Discovery at the Interface of Exposure and Response”) of the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences; and Harvey Clewell (“Linking Health Effects to Exposures using PBPK Modeling for Reverse Dosimetry”) of the Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences.
Competitions were held for both student platform and poster presentations. For the platform presentation competition, four students were selected to present their research based on submitted abstracts. The winner of this competition was Rebecca Bauer of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Participants included Jessica Sorrentino, Suvarthi Das, and Phillip Wages. There were 30 posters presented at the meeting and 17 of these were entered into the student poster competition. Nour Abdo of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill placed first, Julia Rager placed second, and Jessica Wignall and Samira Brooks tied for third place in this competition.
Overall the meeting was successful by promoting presentation skills for graduate students and because of the high quality presentations that focused on the importance of exposure science in toxicology.