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Post category: webinars
2018
What’s new
Webinars
Announcing New Webinar Series on Effects of Plastic on Health
We are excited to announce a new four-part webinar series looking into the effects of plastic on health. Over the next four months, we will be joined by leading scientists, health professionals, policy experts, and advocates to talk about the various impacts of plastics on public health. . . .
2018
What’s new
Meet our 20 Pioneers under 40 in Environmental Public Health: Ana Maria Mora, MD, PhD
Ana Maria Mora, MD, PhD is passionate about sharing what she has learned through her work in environmental public health with everyone. While she spends half of her time in Northern California studying the effects of early-life exposure to pesticides in children living in the Salinas Valley, she spends a lot of her time on research projects that impact the health of people in the country she where she was born and that she calls home, Costa Rica.
While there is attention being given to the field of environmental health here in the U.S., she notes “that in Costa Rica, we’re always behind on research on environmental health topics. There are a lot of epidemiologists and exposure scientists in the US, but in Costa Rica we are very few [epidemiologists and exposure experts]; and the problem that we face is that some people refuse to believe that findings from studies conducted outside of our country can be applicable to our population.” . . .
2018
What’s new
Meet Our Pioneers under 20 in Environmental Public Health: Cynthia Curl, PhD, MS
Cynthia Curl, PhD, MS knows about pesticides. In fact, it has been a topic of research for her for the last 15 years. While much of her work now compares levels of pesticide exposures among consumers of organic versus conventional produce, that isn’t initially where her research began.
“I didn’t start out studying diet or organic food, I really started out looking at pesticide exposures among farm workers and their families. I was working with the Pacific Northwest Agricultural Safety and Health Center, whose mission is…to improve farm worker health. [But,] we had this unexpected finding where we had some kids in Seattle with higher exposures [to pesticides] than kids in farming communities out in Eastern Washington, and it took us a while to even come up with some ideas about why this may be. Ultimately, I started to suspect that it was diet just because of their differences in socioeconomic status and differences in dietary patterns that their parents reported,” Dr. Curl shares. . . .
2018
What’s new
Meet Our 20 Pioneers under 40 in Environmental Public Health: Vanessa Galavíz, PhD, MPH
Vanessa Galavíz, PhD, MPH is committed to making a difference for communities most affected by environmental hazards such as air pollution, pesticides, and water contamination. Her work has always focused on marginalized communities, and her work with the California Environmental Protection Agency and the University of Washington School of Public Health is no different.
She is intent on doing this work because she remembers how she felt when she first learned what public health can do and what environmental health means. . . .
2018
What’s new
Webinars
Meet our 20 Pioneers under 40 in Environmental Public Health: Ana Mascareñas, MPH
Ana Mascareñas, MPH has devoted herself to making sure that everyone has the opportunity for their voice to be heard and finding creative solutions to address inequities. Whether that is through asking for input or taking all points of view into consideration, her goal is that when a project is designed, all community members have had their values recognized.
In her work with the California Department of Toxic Substances Control (CA DTSC), her job is to provide meaningful spaces for underrepresented communities in environmental regulatory decisions that affect them. . . .
2018
What’s new
Meet our 20 Pioneers under 40 in Environmental Public Health: Ami Zota, ScD, MS
Ami Zota, ScD, MS has been working in the environmental health world since she was an undergraduate, and a main focus of her work has been looking at the intersection of environmental health and environmental justice.
Much of her research has specifically focused on “[characterizing] exposure to a wide range of environmental hazards in the general population with a real emphasis on identifying vulnerable populations or highly exposed populations,” Dr. Zota says. . . .
2017
What’s new
Webinars
Meet our 20 Pioneers under 40 in Environmental Public Health: Joan Casey, PhD
Like many who find themselves in environmental health, Joan Casey’s interest in studying the impacts of industrial agricultural came when she heard a startling fact.
“I got involved in doing the antibiotic use in livestock feed work because I took a course where they said that 70% of antibiotics sold for use in the US are used in animal feeds and not in human medicine. That was a really shocking statistic to me,” Dr. Casey shares. . . .
2017
Webinars
Meet our 20 Pioneers under 40 in Environmental Public Health: Brooke Anderson, PhD
With at least 3 major hurricanes (Harvey, Irma, and Maria) hitting the US this season, wildfires covering a good chunk of northern California, and high temperatures breaking records in many states this summer, climate change is front of mind. Extreme weather events are coming and they are getting more intense.
Brooke Anderson, PhD, uses large data sets to analyze the health effects of events like these and look at how they may change in the future. Her work focuses on finding ways to use publicly available, large data sets to think about the health-impacts of extreme climate-related events. To explore this, she and her team are “using models to best predict what might be the health impacts of climate change in the future under different scenarios,” Dr. Anderson says. . . .
2017
What’s new
Webinars
Meet our 20 Pioneers under 40 in Environmental Public Health: Laura Vandenberg, PhD
Laura Vandenberg, PhD, is trained as a developmental biologist, but became interested in environmental health as she started to focus on the times when biology had imperfections. Instead of looking at how stem cells differentiate into skin, or muscle, or tissue, she was interested in “what happens when those processes go wrong,” Dr. Vandenberg shares. . . .
2017
What’s new
Webinars
Meet our 20 Pioneers under 40 in Environmental Public Health: Courtney Carignan, PhD
Courtney Carignan, PhD, got interested in the field of environmental health, and toxic chemicals more specifically, while she was doing work as an environmental consultant and risk assessor after college. One day when she was doing some indoor air monitoring she had to remove chemicals and paint cans in order to do the testing and wondered about their safety. . . .
2017
Webinars
Meet our 20 Pioneers under 40 in Environmental Public Health: Todd Whitehead, PhD
We wanted to find the best young researchers and advocates who might change the future of environmental health. So, we asked a panel of luminaries in environmental health to nominate rising stars who are doing pioneering work. After a rigorous selection process, we invited 20 of these nominees to be our 20 Pioneers under 40 in Environmental Public Health.
This month, we held our first webinar in the series. In addition to these presentations, we got to sit down and learn a little bit more about the researchers. While we did talk about their research, we also learned how they first got interested in the field and what this work means to them, plus a few tips for staying healthy.
Todd Whitehead, PhD, works at the Center for Integrative Research on Childhood Leukemia and the Environment (CIRCLE) at the University of California, Berkeley. He initially got involved in this work by looking at flame-retardants in consumer products. . . .
