Elijah J. Petersen PhD

Elijah graduated from Case Western Reserve University in 2003 with BS and MS degrees in Civil Engineering and a BA in Psychology. He then received a PhD at the University of Michigan studying the ecological uptake and elimination behaviors of carbon nanotubes using earthworms (Eisenia foetida) and sediment-dwelling oligochaetes (Lumbriculus variegatus).

He then received a Fulbright scholarship to do postdoctoral research at the University of Joensuu in Finland where he studied the uptake and elimination of carbon nanotubes and fullerenes in Daphnia magna. Elijah joined NIST as a National Research Council postdoctoral research fellow from 2009-2010 and then became a staff research scientist in 2010. In vitro and acellular assays can play an important role in determining the potential toxicity of compounds to humans and ecological receptors.

To establish the extent of the biological relevance of these assays in predicting the effects in physiological systems, a high-level of confidence in the precision and robustness of these assay measurements is required. My research focuses on comprehensive evaluation of in vitro assays to improve the repeatability and interlaboratory agreement of the assay results. This could entail using cause-and-effect analysis to understand sources of variability in the assay, designing new plate layouts that include key process control measurements, and utilizing appropriate statistical analyses to understand the assay results and their uncertainties.