The NanoRelease projects were built from the ground up by Richard Canady recruiting key partners who then recruited the steering committees. For NanoRelease Consumer Products the initial partners were Jeffrey Morris of US Environmental Protection Agency (then within the Office of Research and Development) and Shaun Clancy of the Nanotechnology Panel of the American Chemistry Council. The partners quickly grew to include Yasir Sultan of Environment Canada, Cathy Fehrenbacher of EPA, Darrell Boverhof of Dow Chemical, Myriam Hill and Andy Atkinson of Health Canada, Treye Thomas of Consumer Product Safety Commission, and many more. At the time, Richard Canady was Director of the Center for Risk Science Innovation and Application of ILSI Research Foundation (RSIA), and is now managing director of NeutralScience LLC.
Similarly, the initial partners recruited to the NanoRelease Food Additive Steering Committee were Tom Neltner of Pew Charitable Trusts, Andy Atkinson of Health Canada, Annette McCarthy of US Food and Drug Administration, Steve Roberts of University of Florida, and Shaun Clancy of the ACC Nanotechnology Panel. Again, the group quickly grew to the full Steering Committee.
The steering committees then became self-governing bodies with elected co-chairs. The steering committees made the decisions for content and strategy and created charges and recruited experts for specific tasks. Terms of agreement and charters were developed for the steering committees; however, formal consortium agreements were not developed for most of the work performed (memoranda agreements were developed between some participants for later stages of some of the work that required transfer of data and materials).
All work by the steering committees and with three exceptions by the task groups were “in kind” effort. Therefore, the “about” story of the NanoRelease projects is told through the many volunteer participants shown throughout the web site.
The three exceptions to the volunteer effort were that
- Funding was sought by and provided to what was termed the “secretariat” by the project to support the activities of the Steering Group and the Task Groups. At the height of the projects this meant 3 or more conference calls a week, with agendas and charges and minutes, to coordinate progress among 10 active task groups with about 60 active members. In addition, the funding for drafting of agreement documents, initial charges and agendas, and logistics of the workshops and travel of academic and NGO experts to the workshops was also done through the secretatiat. The secretariat of the project included Richard Canady, Libby Tsytsikova, and Stephen Froggett. RSIA was discontinued in January 2015 and since then Richard Canady has continued in the secretariat role through funding provided by Health Canada and ACC Nanotechnology Panel to NeutralScience LLC.
- A white paper used by the NanoRelease Consumer Products project was funded through independent contracts between Environment Canada with and Stephen Froggett.
- The NanoRelease Consumer Products Phase 2.5 Report for NanoRelease Consumer Products was completed in part through a contract for $20,000 to IUTA for expert contributions to conduct of the interviews and drafting of that report.