ORISE Health Studies participates in the NCRP Annual Meeting

ORISE Health Studies Director Ashley Golden, Ph.D., and ORISE Epidemiologist Sara Howard were invited presenters at the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP) Annual Meeting on March 24-25, 2025, in Bethesda, Md. The overall theme for the NCRP Annual Meeting was, “The Million Person Study: Current Results and Vision for Radiation Epidemiology and Protection,” which was intended to highlight the important work of the Million Person Study (MPS) for ensuring the health of the nuclear workforce through rigorous evaluation of the health risks associated from ionizing radiation exposure in one million U.S. workers and veterans.

Golden’s presentation, “U.S. Department of Energy Radiation Cohorts: Importance to the Million Person,” provided an overview and current progress of the DOE radiation cohorts within MPS, which represents more than 300,000 workers from multiple DOE facilities. Golden’s presentation also discussed how MPS leverages data previously collected from sources such as the historical DOE Health and Mortality Studies and DOE’s Radiation Exposure Monitoring System to study each facility included in MPS.

Howard’s poster presentation titled, “One Million People and Millions of Data Points: A Practical Implementation of the Data Lifecycle using the Million Person Study and Comprehensive Epidemiologic Data Resource,” highlighted the relationship between the MPS and Comprehensive Epidemiologic Data Resource (CEDR). CEDR is DOE’s data repository, which houses health and mortality data of DOE workers, contractors, or former from previously published studies. The majority of the data in CEDR pertain to occupational exposures to radiation and the associated effects, which makes CEDR a value resource for the MPS.