Professional Profile
Dr. Isabel Lea is a senior toxicologist in ToxStrategies’ Health Sciences practice. She has more than 25 years of experience, focusing on evaluating and assessing data for environmental chemicals with the potential to cause health effects. Dr. Lea has broad scientific and technical experience in data analysis and interpretation, and preparation of peer-reviewed scientific manuscripts. Her areas of expertise include hazard identification for incorporation into human health risk assessments, systematic literature review and conducting assessments to evaluate the endocrine disrupting potential of test agents. Dr. Lea has used this expertise to develop documents regarding risk-based toxicity assessment for regulatory agencies. She was involved in the preparation of OSRI (Other Significantly Relevant Information) reports identified for Endocrine Disruptor Screening Program Tier 1 screening, for use in their weight-of-evidence assessments for Tier 2 testing.
Dr. Lea has significant experience evaluating in vivo and in vitro data, including genetic toxicology (Comet, micronucleus, and Ames assays), toxicogenomics, and high-throughput screening (Tox21) and high-content screening data. This work was conducted in support of toxicology projects for the National Toxicology Program (NTP) and the NTP Interagency Center for the Evaluation of Alternative Toxicological Methods (NICEATM). In support of these agencies, Dr. Lea’s role covered all aspects of projects including project design, data evaluation, leading the evaluation teams, developing standard operating procedures, data dictionaries, and quality control criteria. Dr. Lea has extensive experience with toxicology data management for the Chemical Effects in Biological Systems (CEBS) and Integrated Chemical Environment (ICE) platforms. For CEBS, she played key roles, as lead data scientist and Program Manager. The CEBS database contains data from the NTP Toxicology Testing Program. In this capacity, Dr. Lea developed standard processes for data input to the CEBS system, created verification and validation processes to ensure that public data accurately represented the data delivered to the system. She was instrumental in promoting standard terminology in CEBS and oversaw the addition of CEBS terms to the Ontology for Biomedical Investigation. Promoting the FAIR guiding principles, she also was instrumental in making CEBS data available through Healthdata.gov. Regarding her role with ICE, which provides curated data sets and tools designed to facilitate the safety assessment of chemicals, Dr. Lea played a key role in updating data sets to include cancer endpoints.
Dr. Lea has published academic and professional work in peer-reviewed journals, has reviewed submissions for scientific journals, and regularly attends and presents at professional conferences and colloquia. Dr. Lea is a Program Manager Professional (PMP), which has provided her with the knowledge, expertise, and skill needed to lead a large team of scientists and manage simultaneous projects while delivering on time, within budget, and with excellent client satisfaction ratings.