Internationally Recognized Expert on Environmental Links to Cancer to Deliver Sokol Science Lecture Oct. 26

Dr. Sandra Steingraber, an internationally recognized expert on the environmental links to cancer and reproductive health--and a cancer survivor--will deliver the Margaret and Herman Sokol Science Lecture on Oct. 26 at 8 p.m. in the Alexander Kasser Theater. Her lecture, "Contaminated without Consent: How Chemical Pollutants in Air, Food and Water Violate Human Rights," is free to members of the campus community; $10 for others.

Steingraber's highly acclaimed book, Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment, presents cancer as a human-rights issue. It was the first to bring together data on toxic releases with newly released data from U.S. cancer registries. Living Downstream won praise from international media, including The Washington Post, The Nation, The Chicago Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, The Lancet and The London Times.

In 1997, Steingraber was named a Ms. Magazine Woman of the Year. In 1998, she received the first annual Altman Award from the Jenifer Altman Foundation for "the inspiring and poetic use of science to elucidate the causes of cancer."  She also received the Will Solimene Award for "excellence in medical communication" from the New England chapter of the American Medical Writers Association.

Continuing the investigation that began in Living Downstream, Steingraber’s Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood, explores the intimate ecology of motherhood. Both a memoir of her own pregnancy and an investigation of fetal toxicology, Having Faith reveals the alarming extent to which environmental hazards threaten each crucial stage of infant development. The Library Journal selected Having Faith as one of its best books of 2001. In 2002, it was featured on "Kids and Chemicals," a PBS documentary by Bill Moyers.

She also authored Post-Diagnosis, a volume of poetry, and co-authored a book on ecology and human rights in Africa, The Spoils of Famine.

Steingraber is recognized for her ability to serve as a two-way translator between scientists and activists. In 1999, as part of international treaty negotiations, she briefed U.N. delegates in Geneva, Switzerland on dioxin contamination of breast milk.

Formerly on faculty at Cornell University, she is currently Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Ithaca College in New York. She has taught biology at Columbia College in Chicago and held visiting fellowships at the University of Illinois, Radcliffe/Harvard and Northeastern University, and served on President Clinton’s National Action Plan on Breast Cancer.

Steingraber received a doctorate in biology from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree in English from Illinois State University.

Through a generous gift from alumna Margaret Sokol '38, the Margaret and Herman '37 Sokol Science Lectures were established to allow members of the University and surrounding communities to gain a greater appreciation and expanded knowledge of important issues in science.