The Risk Management Center is an interdisciplinary organization established in 1991 to support ORNL's Energy Research, Environmental Restoration and Environmental Safety and Health programs. A major mission of the center is to focus the laboratory's resources even more strongly on evaluating risks to human health and the environment, and on prioritizing and solving environmental problems. The center's director is Curtis C. Travis of the ORNL Health Sciences Research Division.
As deputy director of the center, Sharples will help plan risk management programs and help to mobilize the talents of ORNL staff to solve risk-related problems.
Sharples joined the Environmental Sciences Division at ORNL in 1978 as a research associate in the Environmental Impacts Program. She also worked in Central Management's Program Planning and Analysis Office from 1982 to 1984. She was a group leader in the Environmental Sciences Division from 1987 until assuming her present position.
She earned a bachelor's degree in biology at Barnard College in New York City and a master's degree and a doctorate in zoology from the University of California at Davis.
She is a member of Sigma Xi, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Institute of Biological Sciences, the National Association of Environmental Professionals and the Association for Women in Science. She was a member of the National Institutes of Health Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee from 1984 to 1987, served on the Environmental Protection Agency's Biology Review Panel and was a AAAS/Environmental Protection Agency Environmental Science and Engineering Fellow in 1981.
She was a AAAS Congressional Fellow from 1984 to 1985, during which time she also worked as a legislative assistant for then-Senator Al Gore. She was elected a Fellow of AAAS in 1992 for "using ecological expertise in the development of scientifically sound environmental policies." She also has been a consultant to the United Nations Environment Program and the University of Maryland's Biotechnology Institute.
Sharples, a native of Queens, N.Y., lives in West Knox County.
ORNL, one of DOE's multiprogram national research and development facilities, is managed by Lockheed Martin Energy Systems, which also manages the Oak Ridge K-25 Site and the Oak Ridge Y-12 Plant.