Mentoring Committee
Carrie Breton, Chair
Carrie Breton, ScD is Professor of Population and Public Health Sciences at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and Director of the Maternal And Developmental Risks from Environmental and Social Stressors (MADRES) Center for Environmental Health Disparities. Her research addresses the interplay between environmental health inequities, social stressors, and epigenetic mechanisms underlying child health outcomes, with a focus on cardiometabolic and respiratory health. She has taken a multigenerational approach in evaluating exposures to air pollutants, tobacco smoke, heavy metals and chemicals, coupled with exposures to psychosocial and built environment stressors, on birth outcomes, infant growth trajectories and increased childhood obesity risk. She has a longstanding interest in understanding how environmental exposures alter epigenetic profiles in pregnancy and across childhood, and how those changes drive disease risk.
Francine Laden, Founding Chair
Francine Laden, ScD, MS, is Professor of Environmental Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School and the Brigham & Women’s Hospital. Dr. Laden received her ScD in Epidemiology and MS in Environmental Health from the Harvard School of Public Health. Her research interests focus on the environmental epidemiology of chronic diseases, including cancer, respiratory and cardiovascular disease. Her research has or is concentrated on the following categories of exposures: air pollution (from ambient and occupational sources), persistent organic pollutants (POPs; organochlorines), secondhand smoke, and the contextual environment (e.g. built environment and green spaces). She is specifically interested in the geographic distribution of disease risk, incorporating geographic information system technology into large cohort studies to explore risk factors such as the built environment and indicators of socioeconomic status, as well as air pollution. She has published key papers on the association of ambient particulate matter and all cause and cardiovascular mortality in the landmark Harvard Six Cities Study and the Nurses’ Health Study and on the association of diesel exhaust exposures and lung cancer mortality in the trucking industry.