Governor's Top Choice

California Governor Edmund G. Brown, Jr. has appointed Pharmacology and Toxicology alumnus, George Alexeeff, as director of the Office of Environmental Health and Hazard Assessment at the California Environmental Protection Agency.

Alexeeff has been the deputy director at the Office of Environmental Health and Hazard Assessment since 1998. He also served as chief of the Air Toxicology and Epidemiology branch from 1990 to 1998 and chief of the Air Toxics Unit from 1988 to 1990. Alexeeff received his doctorate from UC Davis.

Alumni Win Major Awards at the 2012 Society Of Toxicology Annual Meeting

Myung-Haing Cho won the Leading Edge in Basic Science Award, which recognizes a scientist "who, based on his/her research, has made a recent (within the last five years), seminal scientific contribution/advance to understanding fundamental mechanisms of toxicity. The recipient should be a respected basic scientist whose research findings are likely to have a pervasive impact on the field of toxicology."  Cho's contributions to our understanding of the influence of high dietary inorganic phosphate on lung tumorigenesis through Akt signaling pathways and his development of gene delivery systems for altering the progression of tumors shows substantial promise in the control of lung cancer.

Cho received his D.V.M. and M.S. degree in Toxicology at Seoul National University before attending graduate school at UC Davis. He received his Ph.D. in Pharmacology and Toxicology in 1992, and spent two years in Professor Swenberg's lab at the University of North Carolina before returning to Seoul to accept a faculty position in the School of Veterinary Medicine, Seoul National University. He rose through the ranks rapidly achieving full professor status in 2005. Cho has authored 15 books/book chapters, more than 250 research articles and holds nearly 60 patents. He served for two years as the Director General for the National Institute of Toxicological Research, Ministry of Health, Korea. He is on the editorial board of four journals and serves as the editor-in-chief of the journal, Toxicological Research. Cho is currently Vice President of the Korean Society of Toxicology.

Ben C Moeller, who is a postdoctoral fellow in James Swenberg's lab at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill is the recipient of this year's Syngenta Fellowship Award in Human Health Applications of New Technologies. "The funding ($15,000) is to support mode-of-action research aimed at characterizing dose-dependent effects of xenobiotics on mammalian systems in such a way that the causal sequence of key events underlying toxicity is elucidated. The work should permit a quantitative basis for extrapolation of the results from animal bioassays or animal models (in silico, in vitro) to humans at relevant human doses." 

Moeller received both his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees from UC Davis in 2004 and 2010, respectively. His Ph.D. research was conducted under the guidance of Professor Scott Stanley and focused on the development of innovative and highly sensitive LC/MS/MS methods for measuring steroids and steroid metabolites in urine. His current interest involves the development of markers to probe key steps in the mechanism of action of formaldehyde a cytotoxic and mutagenic aldehyde to which humans are routinely exposed. He is currently investigating the application of LC/MS/MS techniques to measure DNA protein crosslinks in rodents and non-human primates with the overall goal of providing a better scientific basis for assessing human exposure risks to this and other important aldehydes. Moeller is currently a Leon and Bertha Golberg postdoctoral fellow and previously has won the Perry Gehring risk assessment award from the Society of Toxicology. He has published over 15 peer-reviewed papers.