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Baylor > Environmental Science > Student Spotlight > Laura Dobbins
Laura Dobbins

Laura Dobbins

After completing undergraduate studies in biology and animal sciences at Berry College in Georgia, Laura Dobbins worked for year as a research technician a the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Gulf Ecology Division Laboratory in Pensacola, FL. She came to Baylor University to pursue a MS with Dr. Bryan Brooks focusing on aquatic toxicology and risk assessment of endocrine active substances.

Her general research questions include:
  1. How can aquatic hazard be estimated for a class of compounds with limited environmental exposure data?; and
  2. How does a research select a model bioassay for a specific toxicological endpoint when multiple models exist?. She is a US EPA graduate fellow, a past recipient of the SETAC/EA Engineering Jeff Black award for her research, and recently published the first paper from her thesis in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, the leading journal in her field of study.


Articles by Laura Dobbins:
  • Baylor Graduate Student Wins Prestigious EPA Graduate Fellowship by Matt Pene

    Laura Dobbins, a Baylor University graduate student from Knoxville, Tenn. has been awarded a Greater Research Opportunities Graduate Fellowship by the Environmental Protection Agency. Dobbins is among 98 students chosen from more than 1,200 applicants nationwide for the highly coveted fellowships.

  • 2007 SETAC/EA Engineering Jeff Black Award

    Laura Dobbins became the recipient of the 2007 SETAC/EA Engineering Jeff Black Award from The Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry in recognition of Dobbins' life in science and her contributions to SETAC.

  • "Comparison of the Sensitivities of Common in Vitro and in Vivo Assays of Estrogenic Activity: Application of Chemical Toxicity Distributions" by Laura L. Dobbins, Richard A. Brain, and Bryan W. Brooks

    A number of contaminants in municipal effluent discharges are estrogen agonists to fish. Whereas several in vitro and in vivo techniques have been developed to assess the estrogenic activity of these compounds or ambient environmental samples, previous comparisons of the relative sensitivities of these approaches remain inconclusive. We employed a probabilistic hazard assessment approach using chemical toxicity distributions (CTDs) to perform a novel evaluation of relative sensitivities of six common in vitro and in vivo assays.