NEWS
Savannah River Ecology Laboratory holds first joint meeting of AERC and IUR
Dr. Francois Bréchignac addressing attendees on opening day of the joint workshop.
Aiken, S.C.– The University of Georgia’s Savannah River Ecology Laboratory recently hosted the first joint meeting of the Association of Ecosystem Research Centers and the International Union of Radiologists.
The gathering combined the annual meeting of the Association of Ecosystem Research Centers with a workshop that addressed integrating ecosystem science into radioecology.
IUR representatives from France, Norway, United Kingdom, Ukraine, Japan and the United States, met with American and Canadian radioecologists invited by the lab.
Dr. Olin Rhodes, director of SREL and president of the AERC, said the meeting gave scientific experts from various disciplines of ecosystem science and radioecology, the opportunity to discuss how to incorporate ecosystem level experiments and risk-assessment endpoints into the discipline of radioecology.
“The significance of this is that two professional organizations came together to develop solutions to move the field of radioecology forward and to develop priorities for research,” Rhodes said. “SREL is a critical player in this venture as we are taking a leadership role in the revitalization of radioecology in the United States and in creating linkages with other organizations with expertise in radioecology across the globe.”
A congressional briefing in Washington D.C. will follow the joint meeting on Oct. 6. The briefing will address the role of radioecology in national security. Rhodes, Francois Bréchignac, former president of the IUR, and Thomas Hinton, a former research scientist at SREL, and a professor at the Institute of Environmental Radioactivity at Fukushima University in Japan, will speak at the briefing.