Our Team
FAN Staff
Stuart Cooper
Executive Director
Stuart Cooper was unanimously appointed Executive Director of the Fluoride Action Network by the board of directors in June of 2022.
Prior to his appointment, he was FAN’s Campaign Director for 12 years. He has led FAN’s advocacy and legislative efforts, working closely with medical experts, researchers, and local organizers from around the world to help educate communities, journalists, and decision makers. His work has been integral in assisting countless communities in ending or rejecting the addition of fluoridation chemicals to their water, including defeating multiple attempts in several legislatures to pass statewide fluoridation mandates. He also led outreach efforts by authoring FAN’s newsletters as well as developing and expanding FAN’s coalition partnerships, campaign materials, social media presence, email list, and fundraising.
Not long after joining FAN, Stuart led a successful campaign to pass the nation’s first statewide infant fluoridation warning law. It was passed by the New Hampshire Legislature by a vote of 253-23, passed unanimously by the State Senate, and signed by the Governor. Since its passage into law, more states and many municipalities have adopted similar warnings, codifying the risk posed to infants by fluoridated water into law.
Jay Sanders
Education & Outreach Director
Jay Sanders has been with the Fluoride Action Network since 2016 and oversees most of the forward-facing content on FAN’s website and social media.
Jay has decades of experience in the creative fields of digital media, music, photography, and videography and has been working in the environmental sciences since 2013. Jay graduated from San Francisco State University with a B.A. in Political Science.
Jay authors FAN content, curates the FAN news archive, manages the FAN research studies database, assembles working coalitions, and supports ongoing campaigns to stop/remove water fluoridation.
Chris Neurath
Science Research Director
Chris Neurath is the FAN and AEHSP (American Environmental Health Studies Project) Research Director. He evaluates scientific evidence, interprets it for non-specialist and lay audiences; conducts research; produces scientific reports for publication in peer-reviewed journals, submission to government agencies, and testimony in public hearings. He has a BSc degree from Yale University in Geology and Geophysics and subsequent graduate-level studies in environmental science at the Yale School of the Environment. He first started working with Paul and Ellen Connett on environmental health issues 40 years ago, soon after they began their efforts to halt trash incineration and promote recycling and zero waste solutions.
His main focus has been on toxic chemicals, including fluoride, dioxins, pesticides, lead, mercury, and radionuclides. Prior to reading the Project Censored award article on the connection between fluoride-polluting industries and fluoridation, he had grown up accepting his dentist’s opinion, his parent’s opinion, and the incessant Procter & Gamble Crest toothpaste advertising of his childhood, all saying that fluoride and fluoridation were wonderful. Then, Paul Connett asked him to review the foundational fluoridation trial studies in Newburgh NY and Grand Rapids MI. The questionable scientific quality and overt fluoridation boosterism in those studies caused him to start re-evaluating his prior uncritical acceptance that fluoridation was “safe and effective”. Over the past 20+ years having carefully reviewed hundreds of scientific papers as well as conducting his own original research on fluoride, his naïve early view of fluoridation has reversed. An objective review of all the scientific evidence finds fluoridation to be unsafe and relatively ineffective.
Prior to his work with the Connetts, Work on Waste, AEHSP, and the Fluoride Action Network, he worked on toxic chemical and pollution issues for the environmental groups Save The River, Greenpeace, and the Connecticut Fund for the Environment.
While working with the Connetts in the North Country of New York State, he built and lived in an off-grid solar and micro-hydroelectric powered house and campaigned on energy conservation, sustainable living, and climate change issues.
Michael Dolan, Ph.D
Editor, Fluoridation Review
Michael joined the Fluoride Action Network in October 2021 as the editor of the Fluoridation Review. His newsletters include important developments and research related to fluoride and fluoridation that are often underreported or go unreported entirely by the press. Since being recruited to the campaign to repeal fluoridation by Paul Connett at Clark University in Worcester, MA more than twenty-five years ago, Mike has been writing and testifying against fluoridation across Massachusetts
Michael was a research professor at the University of Massachusetts and a lecturer in the Department of Biology. He was instrumental in the formation of the fluoridation archives at the university’s W. E. B. Du Bois Library in Amherst.
FAN Advisors
Paul Connett, Ph.D.
Science Advisor
Paul was the Director of the Fluoride Action Network since its inception in 2000, with the exception of 3 years between 2013-2016. He ended his role as Director in May 2022 and is now a Science Adviser to the group. Paul is a graduate of Cambridge University and holds a PhD in chemistry from Dartmouth College. From 1983 -2006 Paul taught chemistry at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY where he specialized in Environmental Chemistry and Toxicology.
Over the past 36 years his research on waste management has taken him to 49 states in the US, 7 provinces in Canada and 64 other countries, where he has given over 2500 pro bono public presentations.
In 1996, Paul was persuaded by his wife Ellen to investigate the controversial practice of water fluoridation. In 2000, he was one of the founders of the Fluoride Action Network which he directed for 15 years (2000 -2015). In 2003, he gave an invited presentation to a panel appointed by the US National Research Council, which published a landmark review of fluoride’s toxicity in 2006.
In 2010, with two other authors, James Beck, MD, PhD and Spedding Micklem, DPhil (Oxon), he published The Case Against Fluoride (Chelsea Green 2010).
Currently, Paul is the Senior Adviser to FAN and specializes in international liaison among groups in other fluoridating countries. See Paul’s curriculum vitae.
Bill Osmunson, D.D.S., M.P.H.
Senior Advisor
Bill Osmunson graduated from Loma Linda University with Masters in Public Health in 1974 and Doctor of Dental Surgery in 1977. For over 40 years, Dr. Osmunson has been a General, Family, Cosmetic, and Neuromuscular TMD comprehensive dentist. He is an author, researcher, teacher, and grandfather. For about 25 years after graduation, Dr. Osmunson promoted water fluoridation or fluoride supplements. Evaluating the research on both sides of the fluoridation controversy, convinced him that many are ingesting too much fluoride which is causing harm to teeth, bones, brains, thyroid and all cells.
Ellen Connett
Senior Advisor
Ellen has been with the Fluoride Action Network since it’s inception in 2000, first as Director of Pesticides, and then as Managing Director. She has been Treasurer of the group from 2009 to 2023. She retired from FAN in August 2022 and is a senior advisory as well as the Secretary for the board of directors.
Ellen has a long history of environmental and social activism having been highly involved with the American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive (a war that caused the death of an estimated one million people in eastern Nigeria), Operation Omega (co-founder of group to help Bengali refugees that were too weak to cross the border into India during the brutal war that created Bangladesh in 1972), Work on Waste St. Lawrence County, NY (a five-year effort battling a proposed municipal waste incinerator), and Waste Not (editor of weekly newsletter that tracked the waste industry’s efforts to build waste incinerators from 1986-2000).
Billy Hirzy, Ph.D.
Consultant
Bill received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in chemistry from the University of Missouri, then worked 19 years as a research and development chemist. He joined EPA in 1981 as a senior scientist in the Risk Assessment Division of the Toxics Office at Headquarters. Bill’s interest in fluoride toxicity began in 1986 as a Union official at EPA headquarters in 1986, following the lead of Dr. Robert Carton. Both Bill and Bob are charter members of the professionals’ labor Union at EPA HQ and served several terms as Union president. They were responsible for establishment of EPA’s Principles of Scientific Integrity, and they have published articles on fluoride toxicity and the ethical problems with water fluoridation. Bill has also taught chemistry and environmental science and ethics at the university level in Missouri and Washington, D.C.
Michael Connett, J.D.
Consultant
Michael earned his bachelor’s degree, magna cum laude, from St. Lawrence University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He was awarded a Juris Doctor degree, magna cum laude, from Temple University Beasley School of Law. While in law school, Michael served as Editor in Chief of the Temple Law Review. He also received the Faculty Award for Academic Achievement, the Jerry Zaslow Memorial Award, the Kranzel Award, and was recognized for Outstanding Oral Argument in Trial Advocacy. After graduating from law school, Michael served as a law clerk to the Honorable Franklin Van Antwerpen of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Easton, PA and the Honorable Michael M. Baylson of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA. Michael is a member of the American Association for Justice, Public Justice, and he is licensed to practice law by the State Bars of California and Pennsylvania.
Michael has extensive background and expertise in the area of fluoride toxicology, and has filed several federal administrative petitions on behalf of various consumer, environmental, and medical health organizations.
FAN Board of Directors
The Fluoride Action Network is a project of the American Environmental Health Studies Project, Inc., a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. The Board of Directors is the same for both.