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Email: afinkel@law.upenn.edu
Expertise
- Environmental Law
- Government Regulation
Bio
Adam Finkel joins the Penn Program on Regulation as its first executive director and as a fellow at the Law School. He is one of the nation’s leading experts in the evolving field of risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis, with 20 years of experience improving methods of analysis and making risk-based decisions to protect workers and the general public from environmental hazards. He comes to Penn Law from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) School of Public Health, where he is a Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health. For the past three years, he has also been a Visiting Professor of Public and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. From 1995 to 2000, he was Director of Health Standards Programs at the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and was responsible for promulgating and evaluating regulations to protect the nation’s workers from chemical, radiological, and biological hazards. From 2000 to 2003, he was OSHA’s Regional Administrator for the Rocky Mountain states. He recently received the David Rall Award from the American Public Health Association for “a career in advancing science in the service of public health protection.”
Adam Finkel’s primary research interests are (1) quantifying and communicating the uncertainties in risk estimates, and critically examining the claim that risk estimates are invariably too “conservative”; (2) accounting for variations in human susceptibility to environmental and occupational disease; and (3) evaluating policies and technologies that show promise for reducing environmental and occupational exposures simultaneously, rather than transferring risks from one population to the other. He has published more than 40 articles on risk assessment and management in the scientific, economic, legal, and popular literature, and was co-editor of the book Worst Things First? The Debate over Risk-Based National Environmental Priorities (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1994). He is the principal investigator on a new National Science Foundation grant to study the advantages of quantifying uncertainty and person-to-person variation in the costs of environmental regulatory programs. In the spring of 2008, he will be teaching a course on risk regulation at Penn Law.
Representative Publications
Integrity of Scientific Evaluations by Government Agencies, 13 INT’L J. OCCUPATIONAL & ENVT’L HEALTH 128 (2007).
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Remarks upon Receiving the 2006 David P. Rall Award for Advocacy in Public Health
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Book Review, 9 J. INDUS. ECOLOGY 243 (2005) (reviewing CASS SUNSTEIN, RISK AND REASON).
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Who’s Exaggerating? DISCOVER, May 1996, at 48.
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A Second Opinion on an Environmental Misdiagnosis: The Risky Prescriptions of Breaking the Vicious Circle, 3 N.Y.U. ENVTL. L.J. 295 (1994-1995).
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A Simple Formula for Calculating the ‘Mass Density’ of a Lognormally-Distributed Characteristic: Applications to Risk Analysis, 10 RISK ANALYSIS 291 (1990).
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For additional publications, please consult
Current & Recent Research
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Education
- Sc.D. - Harvard School of Public Health - '87
- M.P.P. (public policy) - John F. Kennedy School of Government - '84
- A.B - Harvard - '79
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