CCHP Projects

This listing includes all current, future, and past projects at the Center for Contemporary History and Policy.

Active and Planned Projects

Alternative Energy Pioneers
This collection of stories examines past attempts to develop alternative energy and how the lessons learned can be applied to today’s programs.

Staff: Ron Reynolds

Biotechnology and Global Health
This project will develop comparative research on national and global public policy-making efforts to promote national biotechnology development, specifically in the area of global health initiatives. It will also work to create a network of international, interdisciplinary social science- and humanities-oriented researchers who qualitatively study social, cultural, and political aspects of the interrelationships and interactions among biomolecular sciences, biotechnologies, governing spheres, and social life.

Staff: Pei Koay

Biotechnology History Consortium
The main aim is to establish a Biotechnology History Consortium of nationally recognized research and educational institutions to advance scholarship on the history of biotechnology. Specific goals include stimulating collaboration in collection development on biotech’s history; encouraging the use of member institutions’ rich resources on biotech and their related materials; providing support to history, policy, and social studies of biotechnology researchers; and fostering better public understanding of the history, sociology, and cultural studies of biotechnology.

Staff: Pei Koay

Chemist-Community Collaborations (C₃)
Air pollution, groundwater contamination, and abandoned industrial sites are among the environmental issues that affect communities in the Philadelphia area. Community groups sometimes organize to confront these issues and improve environmental quality in their neighborhoods. Their effectiveness is often limited, however, by lack of access to high-quality, quantitative information about the hazards present in their environment, how residents can be affected, and ultimately what can be done. The Chemist-Community Collaborations (C₃) project addresses the need for better quantitative information about environmental conditions in Philadelphia-area communities by forming and facilitating research collaborations between chemist volunteers and community groups.

Staff: Gwen Ottinger, Elizabeth McDonnell

Controlling Chemicals
This project addresses the fact that we live in a thoroughly chemical world: chemicals provide the backdrop for our everyday lives, and out of necessity we have also learned more about the problems and promise they present. The Controlling Chemicals project explores the dynamic ways in which governments, industries, scientists, and citizens all play an essential role in developing processes to create a balance in our chemical society. Initially this project focuses on a United States context.

Staff: Jody Roberts, Elizabeth McDonnell, Kavita Hardy

CO₂ and Climate Change Speaker Series
A series of distinguished speakers are interviewed on options for controlling carbon and slowing or reversing emissions of carbon into the atmosphere.

Staff: Ron Reynolds

Environmental Decision Making
How can science be mobilized for better decision making? And how can values, an integral part of the decision-making process, be made more explicit and transparent? A cross-institutional team of collaborators from CHF, the University of Maryland, the EPA, and the CDC are working to develop just such a system. Using a tool developed within the EPA called MIRA—Multi-Integral Resource Assessment—the team hopes to develop a system for decision making that can be used to increase the visibility of science in environmental decision making, help highlight research needs, and increase involvement from diverse stakeholders in the decision-making process.

Staff: Jody Roberts

The Experience of Military Medicine
This oral history project looks more closely at the role that military medicine plays in the construction and reconstruction of soldiers during and after war. While a number of veterans’ projects focus on the experience of battle, few tend to focus on the illnesses and injuries that men and women suffer as part of the military establishment. CHF is interested in interviewing both physicians and medical personnel who practice medicine in the military and soldiers who receive care before, during, and after battle.

Staff: David Caruso

Exposed Communities
This project examines how communities in the Philadelphia region face unique environmental challenges and aims to address this issue as it pertains to public and environmental health assessment in selected Philadelphia neighborhoods, yielding more tailored public and health-policy interventions that coordinate with actual needs of communities. The project makes visible the life experiences of target communities and provides environmental history and public policy researchers the opportunity to work with residents to create living histories of their neighborhoods. These histories will be paired up with data simultaneously gathered by public-health researchers to be incorporated into the public-health assessments under way in these neighborhoods.

Staff: Gwen Ottinger, Jody Roberts

Neighborhood Senses Project
The Neighborhood Senses Mobile Monitoring project, led by Ohio Citizen Action and a Cleveland community group, Neighbors of Mittal Steel, uses mobile-phone technology to expand Cleveland residents’ involvement in community environmental issues. In partnership with Lorax Analytics, an NSF Science and Technology Center in Los Angeles, and CHF, the enterprise will develop and implement new software that will allow residents to use their almost always-on, always-worn mobile phones to report the sounds, sights, smells, and tastes coming from the steel plant and to record the physical symptoms they experience as a result.

Staff: Gwen Ottinger

Gordon E. Moore Biography Project
Based on the archival documents and oral history interviews we have collected during the last three years, we have begun to prepare a full-length biography of the Silicon Valley pioneer Gordon Moore.

Staff: Hyungsub Choi and David Brock

Innovation Day
To promote early career innovation, CHF and the Society of Chemical Industry America International Group jointly organize an annual Innovation Day. The Schlinger Symposium, as part of Innovation Day, brings together promising young scientists and technology leaders from across the chemical industries, with a focus on frontiers in chemical R&D. In combination with the medal ceremonies the Schlinger Symposium offers participants the opportunity to learn about cutting-edge science and technology, exchange ideas with peer industrial researchers and entrepreneurs, and prepare to be innovation leaders.

Staff: Ron Reynolds

Making Monitoring Matter
To date, data from community-based air-monitoring studies have not had a significant impact. Groups involved in monitoring—varied in their levels of scientific expertise and approaches to technical questions—have found it difficult to come to consensus on the significance of their results. Further, a lack of resources, especially in community groups, has also led to an almost exclusive reliance on existing regulatory frameworks for interpreting monitoring data. This project aims to increase the potential of ambient air monitoring in environmental-justice communities in order to impact environmental health-risk assessment and air-quality policy.

Staff: Gwen Ottinger, Jody Roberts

Manufacturing Knowledge in Transit
This book project examines the development of the semiconductor industry in the United States and Japan.

Staff: Hyungsub Choi

Materials Science History Project
In collaboration with colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara, this project examines the history of institutionalized materials science in American universities during the height of the cold war. Research sites include Cornell University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Northwestern University.

Staff: Hyungsub Choi

Minorities in Biomedicine and Biotechnology Oral History Project
This oral history project highlights the contributions and experiences of self-identified minorities working in the area of biomedical sciences and biotechnology. The purpose of this archive is not to create an artifact or token archive of minorities in science but to chronicle the stories of how these people became scientists; to engage them on why they choose to identify as minorities and how and why they work on minority and science issues; and to discuss the relevance of diversity to the future of biomedicine, health care, and the biotechnology industry.

Staff: Pei Koay

Nanotechnology in the Pacific Rim
This project aims to place the global development of nanotechnology within the transnational context of the United States and leading East Asian countries, such as Japan, China, and South Korea.

Staff: Hyungsub Choi

Personalized Genomic Medicine (PGM)
The PGM Initiative’s broad goal is to provide its diverse stakeholders with a deeper understanding of the (potential) implications of PGM for a variety of communities and individuals through three approaches: research, oral histories, and conferences. A core area of the project is to engage complex and changing dynamics and evolving relations between science, medicine, government, industry, and larger publics in the United States. The long-term goal will be to include comparative research with other countries as well as to provide global perspectives.

Staff: Pei Koay

The Pharmaceutical Life Cycle
This interdisciplinary project will follow the life cycle of a drug from research to manufacturing and distribution to consumption. It has three large, intersecting goals: to map the flow of a drug’s molecular components from laboratory, manufacturing, and distribution sites of a drug and to identify their impacts on these sites; to show how diverse human populations are affected by a drug’s life cycle; and to inform public-health policy-making discussions by making clear through a detailed case study the connections between health-care (including health disparities), environmental, labor, and research concerns.

Staff: Pei Koay, Gwen Ottinger, Jody Roberts, Hilary Domush

Robert W. Gore Materials Innovation Project
The Robert W. Gore Materials Innovation Project aims to illuminate the diverse contributions of materials innovation within the broader process of technological development in the contemporary age. It documents, analyzes, and makes known the immense benefits of materials innovation through its white paper series, Studies in Materials Innovation. The Gore Innovation Project is made possible by the generous financial contribution of Robert W. Gore, chairman of W. L. Gore & Associates.

Staff: Hyungsub Choi

Sustainability Reporting
Current research includes the state of sustainability reporting standards and metrics among chemical, petroleum, and pharmaceutical companies. Findings explore the fact that corporate sustainability reporting has essentially replaced traditional financial-only reporting among major corporations in the last two decades. However, there is no comparability among sustainability indicators and report formats between industries and companies, no metrics for many indicators, and little or no translation of environmental impacts into financial implications. There are over 100 institutions with an interest in this area, and their activities and publications have been documented.

Staff: Susan Saltzman

TSCA Oral History Project
Calls for chemical reform have gained momentum at the state and national levels. While nearly everyone involved can agree that change is needed, debates center on whether or not TSCA—the Toxic Substances Control Act—can still work as the backbone of a chemicals policy in the United States. In this oral history project we conduct in-depth interviews with individuals involved in the process of writing and negotiating TSCA: we gain their perspective on the law, what it has done, and whether or not it can continue to work in the 21st century.

Staff: Jody Roberts, Elizabeth McDonnell, Kavita Hardy

Wingspread Oral History Project
The 1991 Wingspread Conference on Chemically-Induced Alterations in Sexual Development: The Wildlife/Human Connection served as a meeting ground for the interdisciplinary group of researchers that would later form the backbone of the environmental endocrine-disruptor community, providing a platform for reimagining both chemical regulatory policy and environmental harm and human disease as an integrated ecological system. The project consists of a comprehensive oral history of the 20 signatories of the 1991 Wingspread Consensus Statement to reflect on how this field came into existence, the role the conference played in galvanizing the group’s identity, and the direction research has taken since.

Staff: Elizabeth McDonnell, Jody Roberts

Women in Biomedicine and Biotechnology Oral History Project
This oral history project looks at the role of the women’s movement in influencing the rise of women in biomedicine. More than a generation has passed since the women’s movement in the 1970s. Women have made many contributions in biomedicine. More doors have been opened for them. At the same time, as many social researchers document, institutionalized gender politics can still play a role. This is a vital time to capture the oral histories of women who sought to establish themselves in the field of biomedicine and its related industries in the 1960s through the 1980s.

Staff: Pei Koay

Women in Chemistry Oral History Project
The Women in Chemistry Oral History Project aims to collect interviews with women who received chemistry degrees in the post-Title IX era. A major focus of this project is to bring women in the greater Philadelphia area together to create a social network for current and aspiring chemists, and provide them a forum within which to discuss the experiences recorded in our oral histories. We plan to use the materials in this collection to develop educational materials for young women interested in pursuing chemistry as a field of study.

Staff: Hilary Domush, David Caruso

Past Projects

Biotechnology Clusters
Clusters are geographic concentrations of entrepreneurship and innovation. Clustering has been a prominent feature of the growth of biotechnology, as biotech companies emerged in areas with outstanding molecular-biology expertise combined with substantial opportunities for commercializing innovative research. Biotechnology innovation has generally occurred in certain geographic locations. A conference, "Building Biotechnology: The Past, Present, and Future of Biotechnology Clusters," hosted by the Center at CHF in April 2007 to address the question, What are the technical, business, and governmental policy factors that contribute to this phenomenon?

Staff: Ted Everson

Inventing the Digital Age
This book project examined the history of Fairchild Semiconductor through its initial years as the company made its technological breakthrough of the planar process, which became the platform technology for microchip fabrication. The book, Understanding Moore’s Law: four decades of innovation, edited by David C. Brock, was published in 2006.

Staff: David Brock

Low-Dose Toxicity
Controversy surrounds the claim that low-dose toxicity is a public-health problem requiring immediate regulatory intervention. Concerns include the low-dose effects of endocrine-disrupting chemicals, or hormonally active agents, which are the subject of ongoing EPA screening and testing. Through biomonitoring we now know that our bodies are "burdened" with traces of literally hundreds of industrial chemicals that have not been tested for health effects. For critics the question remains: are low-dose health effects "real"? This symposium, organized in conjunction with the Villanova University School of Law, explored the phenomenon of "low-dose chemical effects," discussing ongoing regulatory efforts, the status of scientific research, and potential actions.

Staff: Jody Roberts

Moore Foundation Project
With generous funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, we have completed a three-year project to collect archival documents and oral-history interviews that reflect on Intel CEO Gordon Moore’s life and the broader history of Silicon Valley.

Staff: Hyungsub Choi and David Brock

New Chemical Bodies
The 2007 Gordon Cain Conference, "New Chemical Bodies: Biomonitoring, Body Burden, and the Uncertain Threat of Endocrine Disruptors," was held at CHF in March 2007. The conference brought together experts from academe, government, industry, and NGOs working in fields as diverse as public health, endocrinology, chemistry, sociology, history, and law. They gathered perspectives on current understandings of the ways human biomonitoring studies and research into the endocrine-disrupting effect of chemicals are changing the landscape and discourse of public health in the United States.

Staff: Jody Roberts

Pharmaceutical Risk and Regulation
This project area explored the study of pharmaceutical regulation, private and public research, intellectual property, and drug trials in the United States and other countries. See Arthur A. Daemmrich’s Pharmacopolitics: Drug Regulation in the United States and Germany (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 2004).

Staff: Arthur Daemmrich

R&D Meets M&A
This project looked at the role of R&D competency and compatible innovation cultures in successful mergers. The mission was to bring together diverse stakeholders to illuminate the relationship of mergers and acquisitions to research and development and to address the role of innovation in the chemical industry’s future. Industry directors, technology officers, CEOs, business analysts, economists, and historians convened for a symposium, “Innovation and Creativity in Chemical R&D,” held at CHF in April 2003. Two questions were put to the participants: Is today’s chemical industry mature, with little payoff to be expected in R&D? Has a decade of merger-and-acquisition activity undermined innovation and chemistry in the industrial research setting?

Staff: Arthur Daemmrich