Robert F. Phalen, PhD is a Professor in the Department of Medicine/Division of Occupational and Environmental Health, College of Health Sciences, University of California, Irvine (UCI), California and co-director of the UCI Air Pollution Health Effects Laboratory. Although his primary areas of research are inhaled particle physics and the health effects of air pollution, he has considerable experience in ethics for health professionals. He chaired the UCI Institutional Review Board (for human research) for seven years, during which his committee reviewed about one thousand protocols, and dealt with many ethics problems. After that, he was a member of the UCI Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee for seven years (serving one year as chair of the Committee). Hundreds of protocols passed through that committee, and it was also involved in maintaining the institution’s accreditation by the American Association for Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care (AAALAC).He has been active in publishing, training, and teaching related to ethics. He has published ethics related chapters in books, and performed ethics teaching at the high school, undergraduate, and medical resident levels.He received the Distinguished Service Award for Public Education from the California Society for Biomedical Research; the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Toxicology (Inhalation Specialty Section); and was elected as a Fellow of the Southern California Academy of Sciences; the Academy of Toxicological Sciences; and of the American Association for of the Advancement of Science. He has published nearly 200 chapters and journal articles, authored/coauthored four books, and edited or co-edited several others.He served as chair of the UCI Committee for Medical Education, and as a member of the UCI Health Sciences Executive Committee. He is chair of the Board of Directors of the California Society for Biomedical Research, an organization that is involved in training, promoting, and defending ethically-conducted biomedical research. He has recently served on a National Academies of Science committee on the ethics of human subject research.
