M.C. Townsend Associates, LLC
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Course Director
Mary C. Townsend, Dr. P.H.
Dr. Mary Townsend is a Spirometry and Epidemiology Consultant for industrial and research clients and an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health at the Graduate School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh. She is lead author of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (ACOEM) Position Statements on Spirometry in the Occupational Setting and Evaluating Pulmonary Function Change Over Time in the Occupational Setting, and an active member of the American Thoracic Society (ATS). She frequently presents workshops and lectures on the interpretation and pitfalls of Spirometry in the Occupational Setting at annual ACOEM meetings, both at the national and regional levels. She also presents Pre-Conference Workshops on "Spirometry in the Occupational Setting" for the American Association of Occupational Health Nurses (AAOHN) at the American Occupational Health Conference (AOHC). She presented an illustrated summary of Technique and Equipment Pitfalls in Spirometry at the NIOSH Workshop on Best Practices in Workplace Surveillance in 2001. She was first author of Is My Lung Function Really That Good? an article on real-world spirometry problems that elevate test results, published in Chest in 2004. She is a frequent reviewer for Chest and has recently joined the Chest Editorial Board.
Dr. Townsend is an experienced, enthusiastic teacher of NIOSH-Approved Spirometry and Spirometry Refresher courses. Her goal is to teach not only what the recommendations and requirements are for conducting tests and interpreting results, but also why the recommendations and requirements were developed.
For more than 25 years, she has taught health professionals how to conduct spirometry tests, designed spirometry quality assurance programs, and provided consulting services for numerous research, industrial, and health care clients. Her clients include General Motors, the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa), Dow Chemical Corporation, the U.S. Library of Congress, and the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). Before working as an Independent Consultant, she worked as a Visiting Scientist and Research Epidemiologist at NIOSH, and as an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh.