Lisa Truong

The overall goal of my research program is to utilize the zebrafish model to help build computational predictive toxicity models. Secondarily, my goal is to move the field to be less reliant on animal testing and to conduct toxicity-testing based on toxicity pathways. I have Bachelor’s degree in Pre-pharmacy with a minor in Chemistry, which provided the foundation to evaluate a structurally diverse class of fluorinated compounds during my Masters studies. My PhD thesis was focused on developing rapid in vivo assays to investigate structure response relationships using larval and adult zebrafish. Using the methods I developed, the zebrafish developmental toxicity screen is now fully automated at the Sinnhuber Aquatic Research Laboratory (SARL). I have applied this testing platform to nanoparticles, diverse chemical libraries, flame retardants, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. For my post-doctoral training at the US. Environmental Protection Agency, I developed systemic toxicity models – while working within then National Center for Computational Toxicology and L’Oreal. I built numerous models using the high throughput data generated from over 800 assays and became adept at programming in R and in advanced statistics. More recently since my recruitment as the Deputy Director of the SARL, I have begun to build robust statistical methods to integrate the multi-dimensional phenotypic and expression zebrafish data and I have helped to streamline data collection which has further increased the throughput which is critical for this proposal. In summary, for nearly a decade, I have developed advanced zebrafish as a premier model for environmental health sciences research. We are now at a point to begin mining the data to develop models to prioritize and predict toxicity of chemicals/nanoparticles/mixtures that have insufficient hazard information. In addition to my scientific contribution, I have been a project manager for all projects, and been in charge of ensuring the expected outcome are achieved.