Meredith Golden is a Senior Research Associate in the Science Application Division at the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), part of the Columbia University Earth Institute. She serves as the Co-PI for the Columbia Superfund Research Program Research Translation Core. Ms. Golden received her undergraduate degree from Yale University and a Masters of Science in Economics: Urban and Regional Planning from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She first starting working on issues related to exposures and health effects from hazardous waste sites as an environmental and economic analyst with the Conservation Foundation’s Toxic Substances Control Program in 1979. While in Washington, DC, she helped organize and facilitate “dialogue groups”, consisting of stakeholders from private industry, non-profit environmental groups, and government agencies, which discussed how best to interpret and implement legislation related to hazardous chemicals. Ms. Golden also participated in several EPA meetings concerning the passage of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), also known as the Superfund, in December 1980.

As a doctoral student in Medical Geography and MSPH candidate in Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Ms. Golden continued to focus on hazardous waste sites and undertook one of the first surveys of ATSDR’s health assessments. She also interned with the National Academy of Engineering, researching the impacts of technological hazards and related equity issues. In the 1990s, as part of an EPA cooperative agreement with CIESIN, Ms. Golden worked on developing an information system to help determine populations at risk of hazardous exposures from DOD and DOE facilities. Her extensive background in geography, demography, planning, economics, and epidemiology provides a broad interdisciplinary perspective to issues related to the design, implementation, and impact of Superfund sites on public health. As co-PI for the Columbia SRP Research Translation Core “Collaborating with Government & the Public: As & Mn Exposure via Groundwater”, Ms. Golden has focused her attention on best practices for sustained dialogue among the SRP research projects, cores, government agencies, and interested parties. Geospatial data integration and mapping are two of the key tools toward accomplishing this goal.