Chiara Accolla, Senior Scientist: 2024’s SETAC Annual Conference has been an enriching conference! Throughout the conference, I had interesting discussions with colleagues and friends on the role of population modeling in risk assessment and how Europe and USA approach this differently. At the time of the conference, the EU is pushing forward in its use of models for actual risk assessment while the USA is moving more conservatively in that direction. 

My conversations also covered science-based ecological risk assessment. On October 22nd, I presented a session on using mechanistic effect modeling to support ecological risk assessment in the context of the Endangered Species Act. I was very pleased to be invited to the panel discussion that followed that session and to participate in the launch of the SETAC Effect Modeling Interest Group

Maura Roberts, Project Scientist: My SETAC experience included two different presentation efforts. On October 22nd, I presented a talk in the UV Filters Session and then later that same day, a poster in the Surrogacy Session. 

This year’s UV Filters Session featured talks from EPA, academia, and industry who shared information on different subjects including toxicity, field monitoring, and modeling. The broad consensus from that session was that more studies are needed, specifically toxicity effects, exposure modeling, and monitoring data, and that the UV Filters community needs to collaboratively fill in knowledge gaps and identify vulnerable habitats and species. Waterborne has already performed transport modeling of UV filters in both freshwater and marine environments, and is prepared to do additional work to validate new field studies and estimate exposure to specific habitats and species of concern.

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