Nancy Irwin Maxwell is currently Director of the Communications and Dissemination Core in the Partners in Health and Housing Prevention Research Center (housed in the Community Health Sciences Department), after nine years in BUSPH's Department of Environmental Health.  There she taught introductory environmental health some 25 times.  With a colleague, she developed and co-taught a course in surveillance methods and applications in environmental health; as a solo effort, she developed and taught a course in professional writing skills for public health students.  Dr. Maxwell is the author of a successful introductory textbook, Understanding Environmental Health:  How We Live in the World.  The book was first published by Jones & Bartlett Publishers in 2009; the second edition is due out in early 2013 (see more about the book at this link: http://www.jblearning.com/catalog/9780763793449/). In writing this textbook--and in her communications work in the Prevention Research Center--she draws not only on her teaching experience, but also on her years as a writer and editor, when she often wrote educational materials on technical topics. As a staff scientist at the nonprofit Silent Spring Institute from 1996 through 2000, she directed an intensive breast cancer surveillance effort on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.