CTEH Spotlight: Dr. Dallas Cowan, CIH, DABT (Part II)

We recently introduced you to Dr. Dallas Cowan, CIH, DABT of our new Southern California office. Get to know him even better in Part II of this CTEH Spotlight:

You’ve conducted extensive research on respiratory protection; biological modeling of drugs and alcohol; and product safety assessments. What encouraged you to pursue these lines of research?

These lines of research are all areas I was interested in and where I had found a gap in the literature. For example, early in my career, I focused on product sustainability. At the time, there was a big push in the scientific community to understand what sustainability meant for companies. To help address this issue, I analyzed and summarized what the country’s top 100 firms did for sustainability. Through this research, I found a small portion of these companies actually had sustainability leadership. While this has changed over time, my research helped small and medium-sized enterprises use large companies’ best practices as a model for their own sustainability programs. This work later led to my 70-page research paper on the California Safer Consumer Products Regulation, which provided guidance to businesses on how they could best comply with new protocols. These are just two examples of how I’ve evaluated existing literature, summarized it and published papers to fill holes in industry data. 

You recently published an article about best practices to determining blood alcohol concentrations at specific time points. Tell us more about this.

During my career, I’ve been heavily involved in the pharmacokinetic modeling of blood alcohol concentrations (BAC). In 2016, this research, “The best-practices approach to determination of blood alcohol,” was published in Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology. This publication showed how mathematical modeling, through a combination of alcohol metabolism and post-mortem alcohol generation considerations, can be used to retrospectively determine BAC at a given time point for forensic analyses. Read the full abstract here.

What industry or community organizations are you involved with at CTEH?

I’m a proud member of the Society of Toxicology and the American Industrial Hygiene Association (AIHA). From 2014-2015, I was the president for the San Diego Local Section of the AIHA. I live in Carlsbad, California with my wife and two daughters. In our spare time, we enjoy going to the beach, being active, spending time outdoors and taking advantage of the sunny weather in San Diego.

Have additional questions for Dr. Cowan? Connect with him on LinkedIn