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| Home Page for Tom Purucker |
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I am on staff at the University of Tennessee in The Institute for Environmental Modeling and am also pursuing a doctorate in UT's Ecology and Evolutionary Biology program. I have worked in The Institute for Environmental Modeling at the University of Tennessee developing code for environmental assessment software programs and performing quantitative ecological and human health risk assessments. Particular areas of interest include spatial statistical applications to environmental contamination problems, exposure assessment development, fate and transport of contaminants, ecological population models, and applications of uncertainty analysis to these areas in a decision-making context. In addition to programming and performing hazardous waste risk assessments, I have experience in technical oversight and support, policy development, and scheduling and planning of assessment activities. I am a co-developer and co-principal investigator for the Spatial Analysis and Decision Assistance (SADA) freeware that has been downloaded over 15000 times. I develop and maintain a dynamic link library of over 150000 lines of code consisting of algorithms for statistical, ecological, and human health risk assessment capabilities that work in a spatial GIS context. This library is used in SADA and has also been used in the FIELDS ArcGIS add-in software produced by EPA Region 5. In addition to coding, I am active in all areas of software project development for SADA; including software design, creating and maintaining the web page, documentation and help file development, procurement of funding, quality assurance, distribution testing, and conducting multi-day software training sessions. My research interests lie in the importance of space in environmental risk assessment processes. I am interested in creating methods and tools that assist in the explicit consideration in space for the environmental assessments of risk in a variety of applications. Consideration of space and use of these tools in the assessment process have the potential to improve the estimates of the risk outcomes and therefore can influence the resulting risk management decisions. These improved risk estimates can then be used in optimally designing the risk management decisions that are ultimately implemented. I am particularly interested in ecological risk assessment implementations of dynamic state variable models. I am using these models to construct improved methods for estimating the probability that exposure to contaminants will cause an adverse impact on animal populations. I have developed a number of tools to estimate exposure and effects to individuals and the resulting impacts on population structure. These tools are being developed to work in a spatial context, where the uptake of contaminants by individuals is modeled within a heterogeneous landscape and movement is determined by the relative suitability of areas within its range.
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