Mentoring Committee
Pablo Knobel, Co-Chair
Dr. Pablo Knobel is an Instructor in the Department of Environmental Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. His research bridges exposure science and environmental epidemiology, focusing on how the urban exposome, particularly urban nature, shapes healthy aging. He combines geospatial data science, machine learning, and electronic health records to study these questions at scale.
Lisa Frueh, Co-Chair
Lisa Frueh, MPH is a doctoral candidate in Environmental and Occupational Health at the Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health. Their research focuses on how the institutions we interact with (i.e., schools, workplaces) impact susceptibility and resilience to ambient environmental exposures. Lisa also has an interest in exposure assessment, community-based research methods, and environmental health communications.
Tess Bloomquist
Tess Bloomquist, PhD, is a postdoctoral scientist working in the WATer Exposure Research for Epidemiology, Policy, and Intervention (WATER EPI) Lab at Dartmouth. She recently received her PhD in Environmental Health Sciences from Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. Her work focuses on the impact of prenatal exposure to public drinking water contaminants on birth outcomes.
Carrie Breton
Carrie Breton, ScD is a Professor at the Bursky School of Public Health and co-director of the Solutions through Planetary Health Research (SPHERE) network at Washington University in St. Louis. She also co-directs 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.
Erin Burman
Bio coming soon!
Anjali Kumar
Anjali Kumar is a postdoctoral fellow at RAND studying the neighborhood exposome and aging-related outcomes over the life course, particularly cardiometabolic diseases and cognitive decline. Her research focuses on the role of built and social environment exposures, including traffic, air pollution, mortgage lending and housing, greenspace, spatial inequities, and aging in place.
Samantha Schildroth
Dr. Samantha Schildroth is an Assistant Professor in the Shaw Institute of Public and Planetary Health at the University of New England. She completed her PhD and post-doctoral training at Boston University School of Public Health, and her research focuses on environmental chemical exposures, reproductive, perinatal, and pediatric health. She has been an ISEE member since 2020 and is passionate about creating training opportunities for the next generation of environmental epidemiologists.
Francine Laden, Founding Chair
Francine Laden, ScD, MS is a 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.