About

Dr. David F. Goldsmith has been a consultant in the medical-legal field for over 40 years providing epidemiology services as an expert witness for both plaintiffs and defense law firms in federal and state courts.

He has been qualified as occupational and environmental health expert in proceedings before both federal and state courts. Dr. Goldsmith has testified at Daubert hearings, Proposition 65 hearings in California, and at numerous deposition and trial appearances for both plaintiff and defense law firms.  He has worked for clients in: California, Oregon, Nevada, Texas,  Illinois, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Mississippi, Maryland, Washington, DC, Delaware, West Virginia, New York, Virginia, and Connecticut.

Dr. Goldsmith was a member of the World Health Organization (WHO) International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) panel assessing the carcinogenicity of silica in 1986.  In 2006, he was chair of a peer-reviewed panel on asbestos remediation methods for the U.S. EPA.

Request Dr. Goldmith’s resume here.

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Dr. Goldsmith has acted as a professional adviser to many federal, state, and international agencies, including:

  • U.S. and California Environmental Protection Agencies (EPA)

  • National Institutes of Health (NIH)

  • National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)

  • Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

  • Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC)

  • Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)

  • U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)

Academia

 

Since 1999, Dr. Goldsmith has been an Associate Research Professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services in Washington DC.  He has teaching and research experience in the areas of occupational and environmental health, cancer epidemiology, risk assessment, and application of industrial epidemiology to medical-legal disputes.  His specialty within occupational and environmental epidemiology is, and has been for 25 years, silica and asbestos dust exposure, silica-related diseases, including cancer and other chronic health effects.  In collaboration with Tee Guidotti MD, MPH, he published the first peer-reviewed paper on silica, silicosis, and cancer in 1982.

In 1983, after completing his PhD in epidemiology from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina,  Dr. Goldsmith joined the faculty in the Department of Community and Family Medicine, School of Medicine, University of California, San Diego.

Education

 

Dr. Goldsmith has 25 papers published in the medical peer-reviewed literature on silica and health research issues.  In addition, he has contributed 7 chapters in published books on quartz, and edited or co-edited 5 books or special journal issues on silica-related diseases.

He has organized three international symposia on silica, silicosis, cancer, risk assessment, and other quartz-linked diseases over the past 20 years.  The first was in Chapel Hill, NC in 1984; the second was in San Francisco, CA in 1993; and most recent was held in Santa Margherita, Italy in 2002.

In 1997, Dr. Goldsmith was a member of the National Science Foundation-sponsored U.S.-Japan Joint Seminar on Pesticides and the Future: Minimizing Chronic Exposure of Humans and the Environment.  In 1995, he was a member of the U.S. Agency for International Development team sent to Tashkent, Uzbekistan for a Workshop on Pesticides, the Environment, and Human Health.

Community

 

In the 1990s, Dr. Goldsmith worked for both the Western Consortium for Public Health and the Public Health Institute in Berkeley, California.  His primary focus was on cancer prevention, pesticides and risk assessment for airborne silica dust.  He was the Principal Investigator for a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study, “Agricultural Cancer Prevention Project,” focusing on health education and breast and cervical cancer prevention for farm workers, the Hmong, and farmers in California’s Central Valley.

Through an intergovernmental personnel exchange from 1987 to 1991 he served as Special Assistant for Risk Assessment in the Office of Regional Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 9 in San Francisco, California.  In 1985, he was jointly appointed as Acting Associate Director of the UC Toxic Substances Research and Teaching Program and as a faculty member in the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of California at Davis.

Dr. Goldsmith serves as President of Workplace Health Without Borders, US branch. Learn how to get involved here.