Greg Paoli

I hold a Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering (1991) and a Master’s Degree in Systems Design Engineering (1993), both degrees from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. For my Master’s thesis, I wrote software to capture information on the timing and patterns of ‘firing’ of nerves that trigger muscle contractions measured from surface electromyograms (like an electrocardiogram or EKG, but for skeletal muscles). The software then processed the information using pattern recognition and machine intelligence techniques. The results of the analysis helped clinical neurologists in their diagnosis of neuromuscular diseases.

Following my Master’s Degree, I joined the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Risk Research as Research Manager. In this position, I was exposed to a very diverse set of research projects spanning food safety, climate change impacts on permafrost, the use of software to shutdown nuclear power reactors, exposures of a Hutterite community to dioxins from a vinyl chloride manufacturing facility, and the application of Bayesian networks for probabilistic weight-of-evidence evaluations of carcinogenicity. During this time, I was the Editor and authored several chapters of a book, Climate Change, Uncertainty and Decision-making.

In the early years of my career, I was fortunate to be engaged by scientists at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (based at that time just a few minutes down the road in Guelph, Ontario) to provide assistance in understanding how the concepts of risk assessment, risk management and risk communication would apply to food safety. At that time, Canada was in the processing of signing on to the World Trade Agreement, and one of its key sub-agreements, the WTO Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures. This agreement requires that trading countries apply risk analysis as the basis for any restrictions in International trade. As a result of this very early participation in applying risk assessments to foods, I began providing services and training in risk assessment around the world (starting in Australia, and then in the United States).

I was elected and served a term as the Chair of the Food and Water Risk Assessment Specialty Group of the Society for Risk Analysis. I served on several committees of the Joint Expert Meetings on Microbial Risk Assessment (JEMRA) convened by the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. I served on a U.S. National Academy of Sciences Committee reviewing a risk assessment of E. coli O157:H7 in Ground Beef conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service.

During these early years, I eventually left the Institute for Risk Research in 1997 and moved to Ottawa (to be with my wife of now over 20 years). In that transition, I established a small consulting firm, Decisionalysis Risk Consultants, and continued with a similarly diverse set of projects.

In the mid-2000s, I met with Dan Krewski of the University of Ottawa’s McLaughlin Centre for Population Health Risk Assessment and we explored our common interests in risk management. We eventually agreed to conduct a “merger” of sorts, and co-founded Risk Sciences International in 2006. The merger was to combine the consulting operations of Decisionalysis with some of the consulting activities being conducted at the McLaughlin Centre. Almost 15 years later, we have been fortunate to retain significant expertise from these two organizations within RSI.

The risks associated with chemical hazards (from all routes of exposure) have been a consistent focus. My first risk assessment (other than the risks of having neuromuscular diseases) was to study the extent of exposure to dioxin-like compounds of a Hutterite community which shared a fence-line with a Dow Chemical Company vinyl chloride manufacturing facility. This was an interesting study of what appeared to have the potential to be a worst-case scenario due to the combination of the proximity of the plant and the cultural practices of the community, including their being self-sufficient in their harvesting of food, high lipid consumption and relatively extended practice of breastfeeding. This project provided early exposure to the importance of the social science perspectives on risk including risk perception, risk communication, and professional ethics in risk analysis. I had the pleasure of working for many years with Professor William Leiss, and co-authored a book chapter studying the risk controversy associated with radio-frequency electromagnetic fields and mobile phones in his book, In the Chamber of Risks: Understanding Risk Controversies. (https://www.mqup.ca/in-the-chamber-of-risks-products-9780773522466.php).

Another one of my first risk assessment studies was to develop methodology to combine evidence related to cancer from a series of animal bioassay studies and human epidemiology studies from power-frequency electromagnetic fields, an early and novel application of Bayesian Networks. From 2007-2009, I served on a U.S. National Academy of Sciences Committee established to review the risk analysis approaches used by the US Environmental Protection Agency. This committee was formed 25 years after the publication of the NAS’ “Red Book” and its report therefore became known informally as ‘The Silver Book’, or by its formal title, Science and Decisions: Advancing Risk Assessment. https://www.nap.edu/catalog/12209/science-and-decisions-advancing-risk-assessment. (I was the lead-author of Chapter 3, “The Design of Risk Assessments”). A few years later, from 2012 to 2014, I had the pleasure to serve on another NAS Committee which published the report, A Framework to Guide the Selection of Chemical Alternatives (https://www.nap.edu/catalog/18872/a-framework-to-guide-selection-of-chemical-alternatives). This committee tackled the still very difficult task of fostering the choice of safer chemicals, while avoiding the growing concern and evidence of “regrettable substitutions.” (I was the lead author of Chapter 6, Comparative Exposure Assessment, and Chapter 9, Integration of Evidence to Identify Safer Alternatives). Later, I also served a three-year term on the Scientific Advisory Committee for Health Canada’s Chemicals Management Plan. Recently, I have been collaborating with Weihsueh Chiu of Texas A&M University to advance the work of the WHO International Programme on Chemical Safety in the harmonization of chemical dose-response assessment, as called for in the Silver Book.