is Professor of Community and Environmental Health in the College of Health Sciences at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. He is a leading expert in emergency planning, public health preparedness, and crisis and emergency risk communication for chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear issues. Dr. Becker also has extensive on-the-ground experience at the sites of major events and emergencies around the world. In 2011, he was a member of a three-person assistance team invited to Japan in response to the earthquake-tsunami and accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant.

Dr. Becker was appointed to the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board by President Barack Obama on September 25, 2012.

Before becoming a professor at Old Dominion University, Dr. Becker was a professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Public Health. For the last 11 y, he also has been an invited faculty member for the Harvard School of Public Health training course on radiological emergency planning.

His work on emergency preparedness and risk communication has been recognized with awards from such scientific organizations as the Health Physics Society and the Oak Ridge Associated Universities.

Dr. Becker holds a BA from George Washington University, an MA from Columbia University, and a PhD from Bryn Mawr College. He also was a Kreitman Scholar and postdoctoral fellow at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and a Visiting Fellow at the Japan Emergency Medicine Foundation and National Hospital Tokyo Disaster Medical Center.