Michael D. Waters

Michael D. Waters, holds a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine at Chapel Hill and a B.S. in Pre-medicine (Chemistry and Biology) from Davidson College. He is a former government scientist with more than 35 years of experience in research and research management positions at EPA and NIH/NIEHS and six years of private sector experience as Chief Scientific Officer at Integrated Laboratory Systems, Inc. His research interests have centered on the evaluation of chemically-induced mutations and altered molecular expression in the etiology of genetic disease. He is a widely-published scientist having published well over 100 peer-reviewed in authoritative international scientific journals. He has edited Mutation Research-Reviews for more than 20 years and has held adjunct professorships at both UNC and Duke University for many years. He served as President of both the Environmental Mutagenesis and Genomics Society and the International Association of Environmental Mutagenesis and Genomics Societies. The databases he has developed and a number of his publications are recognized as important advances that have significantly impacted the fields of genetic toxicology, carcinogenesis, toxicogenomics, and risk assessment.

Dr. Waters served as Assistant Director of the NIH/NIEHS National Center for Toxicogenomics and was responsible for a major initiative to develop the Chemical Effects in Biological Systems (CEBS) knowledgebase. CEBS is being utilized by the National Toxicology Program, other government agencies, as well as the academic, industrial, and international regulatory scientific communities as a data repository and analytical toolset for the interpretation of toxicogenomics data. At NIEHS Dr. Waters served on the NIH Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Roadmap Working Group, the FDA Advisory Committee for Pharmaceutical Science, Pharmacology and Toxicology Subcommittee, the Toxicogenomics and Risk Assessment Committee of the International Programme on Chemical Safety (IPCS), the Advisory Board of the Microarray Gene Expression Data (MGED) Society and the Scientific Advisory Board of the Rat Genome Database (RGD).

For 30 years, Dr. Waters directed research in cellular pathology, biochemistry, and genetic toxicology in various capacities at the EPA in RTP, NC. He served EPA as an Assistant Laboratory Director with programmatic responsibility for international, waste, and multi-media research programs. At EPA he conceived, designed, and helped to develop the EPA Gene-Tox database, now hosted by the National Library of Medicine. He also developed the EPA/International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) Genetic Activity Profile (GAP) Database which formed the basis for the use of short-term tests in the evaluation of presumptive human carcinogens by the IARC.