Sheng-Wei Wang, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Robert Wood Johnson Medical School

Exposure Science Division
Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute

Research Interests:

Human exposure modeling of environmental pollutants in multi-media (e.g., air, water, food); the total exposure is studied by estimating multi-pathway (inhalation, ingestion, and dermal contact) intakes through the integration of the spatial and temporal concentration of environmental pollutants with activity patterns. Physiologically-based pharmacokinetic modeling (PBPK) of environmental pollutants; pharmacokinetics modeling provides the link between exposure estimates and toxicology by estimating the uptake of the toxin from environments, the tissue distribution of the toxin, and the processes by which the toxin is excreted or bio-transformed within the human body. Uncertainty/sensitivity analysis of environmental models; characterization of uncertainty in environmental models is critical for identifying key uncertain factors as well as unimportant factors, and identifying research needs and additional lab/field studies to improve the models; traditional methods of uncertainty analysis such as Monte Carlo method are computationally expensive and sometimes prohibitive; this computational difficulty can be resolved by developing reduced models through the High Dimensional Model Representation (HDMR) approach.

Publications:

A. Huber, P.G. Georgopoulos, R. Gilliam, G. Stenchikov, S.W. Wang, B. Kelly, and H. Feingerah (2004) Modeling Air Pollution from the Collapse of the World Trade Center and Assessing the Potential Impacts on Human Exposures, Environmental Manager, February 2004, 35-40.

S.W. Wang, P.G. Georgopoulos, G. Li, and H. Rabitz (2003) RS-HDMR with Non-uniformly Distributed Variables: Applications to an Integrated Multimedia/Multipathway Exposure and Dose Model for Trichloroethylene, J. Phys. Chem., 107:4707-4716.

G. Li, S.W. Wang, P.G. Georgopoulos, and H. Rabitz (2003) Correlation Method for Variance Reduction of Monte Carlo Integration in RS-HDMR, Journal of Computational Chemistry, 24:277-283.

G. Li, S.W. Wang, H. Rabitz, S.K. Wang and P. Jaffe (2002) Global Uncertainty Assessments by High Dimensional Model Representations (HDMR), Chemical Engineering Science, 57:4445-4460.

S.W. Wang, P.G. Georgopoulos, G. Li and H. Rabitz (2001) Computationally Efficient Atmospheric Chemical Kinetic Modeling by Means of High Dimensional Model Representation (HDMR), Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), 2179, pp. 326-333.

Awards and Honors:

1991 Outstanding Scholar Award, Tatung Institute of Technology, Taipei, Taiwan

1989-1990 Tatung Company Award, Taipei, Taiwan

1988-1992 Academic Achievement Award, Tatung Institute of Technology, Taipei, Taiwan