Neptune and Company, Inc.

(505) 550-9701

Robert C. Lee is a Risk and Decision Scientist at Neptune and Company Inc., and is located in Albuquerque, NM. Mr. Lee has been involved in risk assessment, risk management, toxicology, and modeling for 25 years. As a consultant from 1993 to 2000 in the US and Canada, he led a wide variety of environmental (human health and ecological) and food safety risk and decision analysis projects. During this time he also performed risk and decision analyses to inform decisions associated with failure of engineered structures, and conducted numerous toxicological evaluations to support legal cases. From 2000 to 2001 he led large-scale probabilistic human health and ecological risk analyses of oil/gas and mining related projects in Canada. From 2001 to 2010 he was a full-time academic faculty researcher at the Universities of Calgary and New Mexico, focusing upon risk assessment, risk management, and resource allocation in medical care. Mr. Lee joined Neptune and Company, Inc. in 2010. Examples of projects to date include risk assessments at multiple military bases, mining site risk assessments, dose assessments for radioactive waste repositories, a decision analysis for food contamination issues, a decision analysis for urban land use, costing analyses for natural resource damages, and toxicological reviews for government agencies.

Mr. Lee has published over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles, abstracts, book chapters, and reports; and dozens of additional consulting reports. He has served on numerous national and international expert panels. In addition to his environmental experience, he has extensive expertise in applying risk, decision, and economic analysis to problems in health systems and public health.

Enjoying the summit of Huayna Potosi in Bolivia (19,974 feet)

Robert's resume

Selected Peer-Reviewed Publications

Risk Analysis

Dunscombe P, Ekaette E, Lee RC, Cooke DL. Taxonomic applications in radiation therapy incident analysis. International Journal of Radiation Oncology, Biology, Physics 2008 71(1), Suppl. 1: 200-203. PMID: 18406929.
Ekaette E, Lee RC, Cooke DL, Iftody S, Craighead P. Probabilistic fault tree analysis of a radiation treatment system. Risk Analysis 2007 Dec;27(6):1395-410. PMID: 18093042.
Lee RC, Berzins S, Alfieri N. Single-use device reuse risks. Canadian Journal of Infection Control 2007 Fall;22(3):142-146. PMID: 18044383.
Cooke DL, Dunscombe P, Lee RC. Using a survey of incident reporting and learning practices to improve organizational learning at a cancer care centre. Quality and Safety in Health Care 2007, 16: 342-348. PMID: 17913774.
Dunscombe P, Iftody S, Ploquin N, Ekaette E, Lee RC. The Equivalent Uniform Dose as a severity metric for radiation treatment incidents. Radiotherapy and Oncology 2007 Jul;84(1):64-6. PMID: 17586076.
Ekaette E, Lee RC, Cooke DL, Kelly KL, Dunscombe P. Risk analysis in radiation treatment: Application of a new taxonomic structure. Radiotherapy and Oncology 2006 80: 282-287. PMID: 16884798.
Lee RC, Ekaette E, Cooke DL, Kelly KL, Dunscombe P. The challenge of modelling patient safety risk management in a complex health care environment. Clinical and Investigative Medicine 2005 28(6). PMID: 16450630.
Lee RC, Kmet L, Cook L, Lorenzetti D, Godlovitch G, Einsiedel E. Risk assessment for inherited susceptibility to cancer: A review of the psychosocial and ethical dimensions. Genetic Testing 2005 9(1): 66-79. PMID: 15857189.
Lee RC. Why reinvent risk? Nature Biotechnology 2003, 21: 229. PMID: 12610562.
Wong EY, Ponce RA, Farrow S, Bartell SM, Lee RC, Faustman EM. Comparative risk and policy analysis in environmental health. Risk Analysis 2003, 23(6):1337-1349. PMID: 14641905.
Lee RC and Kissel JC. Prediction of exposures to arsenic-contaminated residential soil using Monte Carlo simulation: a comparison with biomonitoring data. Environ. Geochem. & Health.1995, 17: 159-168.
Lee RC and Wright WE. Development of human exposure factor distributions using maximum-entropy inference. J. Expos. Anal. & Environ. Epi. 1995, 4: 329-341.
Lee RC, Fricke JR, Wright WE and Haerer W. Development of a probabilistic blood lead prediction model. Environ. Geochem. & Health. 1995, 17: 169-181.

Decision Analysis and Economic Analysis

Sklar D, Lee RC. What if high-quality care drove medical education? A multi-attribute approach. Academic Medicine 2010 85: 1401-4. PMID: 20736666.
Lee RC, Zou D, Demetrick D, DiFrancesco L, Fassbender K, Stewart D. Costs associated with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma patient treatment in a Canadian integrated cancer care centre. Value in Health 2008 11(2):221-30. PMID: 18380634.
Ekaette E, Lee RC, Kelly KL, Dunscombe P. A Monte Carlo simulation approach to the characterization of uncertainties in cancer staging and radiation treatment decisions. Journal of the Operational Research Society 2007 58: 177-185.
Lee RC, Ekaette E, Kelly KL, Craighead P, Newcomb C, Dunscombe P. Implications of cancer staging uncertainties in radiation therapy decisions. Medical Decision Making 2006 26(3): 226-238. PMID: 16751321.
Patten SB, Lee RC. Epidemiological theory, decision theory, and mental health services research. Soc Psychiatry Psychiatr Epidemiol 2004 39: 893-898. PMID: 15549241.
Lee RC, Donaldson C, Cook LS. The need for evolution in health care decision modeling. Medical Care 2003, 41(9):1024-1033. PMID: 12972842.
Lee RC, Marshall D, Waddell C, Hailey D, Juzwishin D. Health technology assessment, research, and implementation within a health region in Alberta, Canada. Int. J. Tech. Assess. Health Care 2003, 19(3):513-520. PMID: 12962337.
Patten SB, Lee RC. Modeling methods for facilitating decisions in pharmaceutical policy and population therapeutics. Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety 2002,11:165-168.24. PMID: 11998542.
Lee RC, Robinson R, Kennedy M, Swanson S, Nahir M, Identification of long-term environmental monitoring needs at a former uranium mine, pp. 435-442. In: Environmental Issues and Management of Waste in Energy and Mineral Production, 2000, R. Singhal, A. Mehrotra, eds., A.A. Balkema Publishers, Rotterdam.
Bartell SM, Ponce RA, Lee RC, Takaro TK, Omenn GS and Faustman EM. Evaluating risk assessment biomarkers using the value-of-information framework, pp. 1165-71. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Decommissioning and Decontamination and on Nuclear and Hazardous Waste Management, 1998, Denver, Colorado, September 13-18, American Nuclear Society, La Grange Park, Illinois.
Ponce RA, Bartell SM, Kavanagh TJ, Woods JS, Griffith WC, Lee RC, Takaro TK, and Faustman EM. Uncertainty analysis methods for comparing predictive models and biomarkers: a case study of dietary methylmercury exposure. Regul. Toxicol. Pharmacol. 1998, 28: 96-105. PMID: 9927559.

Systems Thinking and Dynamic Modeling

Marshall D, Rogers P, Rohleder T, Vanderby S, Chuck A, Cooke D, Faris P, Frank C, Fyie K, Jonsson E, Kozak S, Lee RC, et al. 2010. System Dynamics Modeling: A Decision Support Tool to Improve Care for Hip & Knee Osteoarthritis. Institute of Health Economics, http://www.ihe.ca/documents/10743%20IHE-book-ModelingWorkshop-revisedb.pdf.
Lee, RC, Cooke, DL, Richards, M. A system analysis of a suboptimal surgical experience. Patient Safety in Surgery 2009 3(1): 1. PMID: 19126219 (rated as “Highly Accessed” by the journal, and “Must Read” by the Faculty of 1000 Medicine).
Cooke DL, Yang H, Curry G, Rogers P, Rohleder T, Lee RC, Strong D. Introducing system dynamics modeling to health care in Alberta. Proceedings of the 25th International Conference of the System Dynamics Society 2007, http://www.systemdynamics.org/conferences/2007/proceed/papers/COOKE178.pdf.
Patten SB, Lee RC. Describing major depression incidence and recurrence patterns using Markov models: Data integration across 3 national surveys. Population Health Metrics 2005 3(11). PMID: 16288648.
Patten SB, Lee RC. Refining estimates of major depression incidence and episode duration in Canada using a Monte Carlo Markov model. Medical Decision Making 2004 24(4): 351-358. PMID: 15271273.
Patten SB, Lee RC. Towards a dynamic description of major depression epidemiology. Epidemiologia e Psichiatria Sociale 2004, 13(1): 21-28. PMID: 15248391.