Stephen M. Levin, MD, is Division Chief of the Department of Community and Preventive Medicine. Since his appointment in 1981, he has made extensive contributions in teaching, course design, and administration of the division, scholarly publications, clinical practice and service to the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Hospital.  In 1987, Dr. Levin became the Medical Director of the Mount Sinai Irving J. Selikoff Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine. His research interests have focused on asbestos-related disease, other occupational lung diseases, and heavy metal toxicity. He has received funding from NIOSH to conduct studies of the health effects of exposure to lead, asbestos, and silica among construction workers in New York City. Dr. Levin has served as a consultant to the New York State, New Jersey, and New York City Departments of Health on the health hazards of environmental pollutants. Dr. Levin was Co-Director of the WTC Worker and Volunteer Medical Screening Program, funded by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. He also served as Principal Investigator and Director of the Data and Coordination Center for the federally funded WTC Medical Monitoring Program that provides repeat examinations for the WTC responder cohort that now numbers over 17,000 examinees. Dr. Levin has recently received funding to assist in the validation of serum biomarkers for Mesothelioma among workers with a history of high exposures to asbestos. In addition, he is working with the EPA to assist in creating a screening and monitoring program in Libby, Montana. Dr. Levin has contributed not only through his excellent lectures to unions and the community, but also through a number of well-known articles. Dr. Levin has served as editor of the peer review journal in health care entitled American Journal of Environmental Medicine. As an editor of this fine journal, he is a nationally and internationally known figure and influential in keeping in touch with the latest in literature, research and clinical practice.  Dr. Levin has played an active role at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine as a member of the faculty in the Department of Community and Preventive Medicine.  He continues to be a key member of the Workers Compensation Task Force and the 9/11 Worker's Protection Task Force.  

The 30th Annual Scientific Day of the New York/New Jersey Education and Research Center will look at progress that has been made in terms of better understanding the impact of occupational safety and health on individuals through specific examples. The impact of asbestos on human health has been enormous; seminal work was done at Mount Sinai that laid the foundation for future studies on the connection between asbestos exposure and malignancy. Lead, a ubiquitous heavy metal, has deleterious effects on human health from the fetus to the elderly worker; the assessment of how lead exposure can be measured has changed dramatically over time. The workforce in the United States has also changed over the past thirty years, and as the baby boomers age and remain the workforce longer, there are new challenges related to threats to the older worker. Great strides have been made over the past thirty years, and there is great potential for future work to ensure greater worker safety and health -- and the vision for how workers can be best protected will be addressed in this conference.