INTRODUCING...
OUR PROFESSIONAL ADVISORY BOARD

Crime Times is pleased to introduce our readers to the distinguished members of our Professional Advisory Board. Each issue will feature one member of our board.

HERBERT L. NEEDLEMAN, M.D., is a professor of child psychiatry and pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Prior to taking this position he was an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and attending physician at the Children's Hospital of Boston.

While at Temple University, where he trained in psychiatry, Dr. Needleman became interested in the roots of school failure and learning disorders in inner-city children. Wondering if some school problems were the result of undiagnosed lead toxicity, Dr. Needleman developed a new way to measure children's body burden of lead: through the analysis of teeth. This method is now in use around the world.

In Boston, Dr. Needleman mounted the first large-scale study demonstrating IQ decrements and increased behavioral problems in children with subclinical elevated lead levels (see related article in this issue). In addition, he was the first investigator to study the effects of prenatal lead exposure on infant development. His first major paper, published in 1979, was an important factor in the United States' decision to remove lead from gasoline.

Dr. Needleman has served as a consultant to the Centers for Disease Control and the Environmental Protection Agency.