The Iowa Cancer Consortium’s Cancer and the Environment Task Force is hosting a summer webinar series, “Strategies to Reduce Environmental Cancer Risk,” that highlights actions from the individual to the institutional level that can be taken to better understand and reduce environmental and occupational exposures to cancer-causing substances.
In the second part of this series, Rich Gassman, Director of Iowa’s Center for Agricultural Safety and Health (I-CASH) and Audrey Tran Lam, Environmental Health Program Manager for the Center for Energy & Environmental Education at the University of Northern Iowa, will share best practices for keeping agricultural workers and their communities safe from environmental and occupational exposures that have been associated with different types of cancer.
The goal of the Iowa Cancer Consortium’s Cancer and the Environment Task Force is to connect partners with resources, knowledge, and collaboration opportunities that help them succeed in practicing cancer control work through an environmental and occupational health lens, and vice versa. Learn more about the Task Force here.
More about our speakers:
Rich Gassman grew up on a family farm in Northeast Iowa and was drawn to agriculture from a young age. He received his B.S in Agronomy from Iowa State University and his M.S. in Occupational Safety and Health from the University of Iowa. He is passionate about agricultural health and safety and has spent most of his career working in this area. Both personally and professionally, he understands the unique challenges our agricultural populations face. Gassman is a proven leader who has initiated, launched, monitored, and reviewed safety and health programs for multi-site corporations and organizations.
Audrey Tran Lam holds a masters degree in Public Health from the University of Iowa and a graduate certificate from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Food Systems, the Environment, and Public Health. She oversees two statewide public health education initiatives; Good Neighbor Iowa (focused on elimination of cosmetic herbicide application in public spaces to protect child health, pollinator habitat, and urban water quality), and Farming for Public Health (a program that elevates organic regenerative agriculture as an upstream, land-based solution to the cascading environmental health issues stemming from industrial agriculture), and facilitates the Pesticides & Public Health Working Group. In addition to her work at the CEEE, Audrey serves on the boards of the Iowa Rural Health Association, Heartland Health Research Alliance, and Pesticide Action Network, as well as on the Design Team for Green America’s Soil & Climate Alliance.
Content Disclaimer: The Iowa Cancer Consortium, the state of Iowa’s comprehensive cancer coalition, is a non-partisan, non-political organization and does not use state or federal funds to engage in lobbying. The Consortium’s Cancer and the Environment Task Force’s role is to connect partners with resources, knowledge, and collaboration opportunities that help them succeed in practicing cancer control work through an environmental and occupational health lens, and vice versa. The opinions and interpretation of the information shared by speakers and attendees in this webinar series do not necessarily reflect the positions of the Iowa Cancer Consortium, its board of directors, members, or staff.
