2023 Speakers – USA-European Exposome Symposium

Valentina Bollati, PhD

Valentina Bollati, PhD, is a medical biotechnologist and the chief of the Environmental Epigenetics Laboratory at the University of Milan. She holds a PhD in Occupational and Environmental Health, which was the first step she took in establishing a new line of research investigating how the environment modifies epigenetic and molecular mechanisms, and how these modifications are related to disease outcomes. Her scientific experience, which she gained during an extended stay at the Norris Cancer Comprehensive Center, University of Southern California (Los Angeles, USA), as well as through her work in Milan, has been mainly focused on environmental epigenetics. Her research approach is highly multidisciplinary, bringing together methods from environmental health, medicine, epidemiology, cellular and molecular biology. Her research has the ambition to investigate a wide range of diseases associated with environmental exposures. So far she has explored the interplay between environmental and lifestyle factors and epigenetic signatures, in cardiovascular diseases, cancer, obesity, autoimmune diseases, depression, and pregnancy-related disorders.

Stefano Calza, PhD

Stefano Calza, PhD, is Full Professor of Biostatistics in the Department of Molecular and Translational Medicine at the University of Brescia.

Kecia N. Carroll, MD, MPH

Kecia N. Carroll, MD, MPH, is the Division Chief of General Pediatrics in the Jack and Lucy Clark Department of Pediatrics at Mount Sinai and Professor of Pediatrics and Environmental Medicine and Public Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Mount Sinai Kravis Children’s Hospital. She is a board-certified general pediatrician, clinical investigator, and epidemiologist. Dr. Carroll is a former recipient of early investigator awards from the Parker B. Francis Fellowship Program and the NIH. Her current NIH-funded research program investigates how environmental exposures, including stress, nutritional exposures, and environmental toxicants, during critical periods of development, influence childhood asthma risk. She also served as the Director of Faculty Inclusion and Diversity in the Pediatric Office of Faculty Development and Chair of the Diversity Committee for the Master of Public Health Program at Vanderbilt. Through these roles, Dr. Carroll spearheaded efforts to foster an inclusive environment and in creating mentoring and career development opportunities for faculty, trainees, and students. She serves as a mentor for faculty and trainees across various career stages and academic tracks and through her K24 Midcareer Investigator Award funded by the National Heart, Lung & Blood Institute through the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Carroll completed her medical degree at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, and her Pediatric Residency at the University of California San Francisco, and a General Academic Pediatrics Research Fellowship at Vanderbilt.

Francesco Castelli, MD

Francesco Castelli, MD, is Rector of the University of Brescia where he is Professor of Infectious Diseases and Head of the University Division of Infectious and Tropical Medicine and ASST Spedali Civili of Brescia. He holds the UNESCO Chair “Training and empowering human resources for health development in resource-limited countries” and is also a member of the Scientific and Technical Committee for HIV/AIDS within the Italian Ministry of Health. He served as Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre on HIV/TB Co-infection and TB elimination strategies during 2011-15. His major fields of scientific interest are infectious and tropical diseases, migration medicine and imported infections, global health and chronic viral infections in both industrialized and developing countries. He has published more than 500 papers in peer-reviewed journals and more than 110 chapters of books and manuals. He was awarded the title of Knight of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic in 2011 and was included in the list of Top Italian Scientist in 2013.

Elena Colicino, PhD

Elena Colicino, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.  Dr. Colicino works on methods development for environmental health data in order to assess the effects of individual and joint environmental exposures on human health throughout the life course. She also adapts novel machine learning and Bayesian algorithms to high-dimensional molecular markers to reconstruct prior environmental exposures, predict future health conditions, and characterize vulnerable populations. She strongly supports reproducible and rigorous science creating novel R-packages and making her codes publicly available on GitHub repositories.

Yuxia Cui, PhD

Yuxia Cui, PhD, is Health Scientist Administrator at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). She oversees the exposure science and the exposome grant portfolio that is focused on emerging technologies towards improved exposure and health impacts assessment in environmental health research. These include wearable technologies, omics-based approaches, computational and informatics-based methodologies, as well as other innovative approaches to enable an integrated view and better understanding of the exposome. Cui currently serves as the co-director of the Human Health Exposure Analysis Resource (HHEAR), a trans-NIH program that supports a centralized network of exposure analysis services and expertise to enable comprehensive environmental exposure assessment in population health research. She is also a member of the NIH Common Fund Metabolomics Program leadership team and oversees the day-to-day operations of the Program. Cui received training in molecular toxicology and transcriptomics and received her doctorate in Environmental Toxicology from Duke University.

Francesca de’Donato, PhD

Francesca de’Donato, PhD, is an environmental epidemiologist working at the Department of Epidemiology of the Lazio Regional Health Service in Rome, Italy. She holds a PhD in Epidemiology from Imperial College London and has a background in both epidemiology and climate sciences (MSc Epidemiology, MSC Applied Meteorology and Climatology).  Her main research interests are the health effects of climate change and extreme temperatures with a focus on exposure modelling, identification of vulnerable groups and defining health adaptation plans\actions. She manages the Italian Heat Adaptation Plan on behalf of the Ministry of Health and Civil Protection as well as the Lazio Regional Plan. She is involved in national and European projects focusing on the health impacts of climate change, adaptation actions and policy to climate change in urban areas and for the health care sector.

Nicholas DeFelice, PhD

Nicholas DeFelice, PhD, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and a member of the Mount Sinai Institute for Exposomic Research. Dr. DeFelice studies the environmental determinants of infectious disease transmission. He develops mathematical models that quantify the burden of disease attributable to poor infrastructure and other environmental exposures, along with systems to forecast infectious disease outbreaks. His current research focuses on forecasting West Nile virus outbreaks. More broadly, his research is addressing how climate change influences human health and the environmental solutions that can promote positive health outcomes. Dr. DeFelice holds a PhD in Environmental Science and Engineering at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he also completed his Master of Science in Environmental Engineering. Prior to joining Mount Sinai, his postdoctoral training was completed at Columbia University with a focus on climate and health.

Antonio Gasparrini, PhD

Antonio Gasparrini, BSc, Mbiol, MSc, PhD, is Associate Professor in Biostatistics and Epidemiology in the Department of Public Health Environments and Society at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) in the UK. Dr Gasparrini’s interests encompass various research areas in epidemiology and public health evaluation, including methodology, applied research, and software implementation. His methodological work focuses on the development of study designs and statistical methods for environmental epidemiology. His work has contributed to the creation and extensions of a number of statistical techniques, such as distributed lag models and meta-analytical tools. He is a strong advocate of open science and reproducible research, and he has contributed to the implementation of statistical methods in freely-available software, with the release of tutorials and code in public repositories. His substantive research focuses on the study of associations between environmental stressors, climate, and health. He is the coordinator of the Multi-City Multi-Country (MCC) Collaborative Research Network, an international project that has produced important publications in the area. His current research includes the development of novel study designs for individual and small-area analyses, the use of novel remote sensing and mobile technologies in epidemiology, spatio-temporal modelling of environmental exposures and risks, and health impact projections for climate change.  Dr. Gasparrini completed an MSc in Biostatistics at the University of Bologna in 2005 and a 3-years post-graduate program at the School of Biometry and Medical Statistics at the University of Milan in 2009. He was awarded a PhD in Medical Statistics at LSHTM in 2011.

Megan Horton, PhD, MPH

Megan Horton, PhD, MPH, is Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, is an environmental and life course epidemiologist. Her research combines state-of-the-art environmental exposure assessment with structural and functional neuroimaging and behavioral phenotyping to understand how early life exposure to developmental neurotoxicants affects typical brain development and leads to aberrant cognitive and behavioral outcomes in children. Recently, her research extends to investigate how environmental, social, and occupational stressors impact later life health outcomes including PTSD and cognitive impairment. Dr. Horton is currently the principal investigator of several NIH and NIOSH funded research grants and a key co-investigator on several other projects. Recently, she was elected president of the International Society for Children’s Health and the Environment. She was a recipient of an early career NIH Pathway to Independence Award and during her doctoral studies received a prestigious EPA STAR Fellowship. Dr. Horton joined Mount Sinai in 2013 after earning a MPH and PhD at Columbia University. In addition to dedication to rigorous and innovative science, Dr. Horton is actively involved with mentorship, faculty development, and wellness initiatives within Mount Sinai.

Marianthi-Anna
Kioumourtzoglou, ScD, MSPH

Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou, ScD, MSPH, is Assistant Professor in the Environmental Health Sciences Department and a faculty member of the Climate and Health Program at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Her research focuses primarily on how air pollution exposures impact human health, with a special emphasis on neurological and psychiatric outcomes. She is also investigating factors that potentially modify these associations, including life-style choices, community and neighborhood characteristics, and weather. In addition, she is very interested in statistical issues related to environmental epidemiology, such as exposure to environmental mixtures and exposure measurement error. She is conducting large-scale epidemiologic studies, for which she is integrating information across multiple different data sources, accounting for potential misalignment in space and time. Dr. Kioumourtzoglou is an environmental engineer and received her ScD in Environmental Health from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health in 2013.

Jana Klánová, PhD

Jana Klánová, PhD, is Professor of Environmental Chemistry at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, and a director of RECETOX (www.recetox.muni.cz), the European Centre of Excellence in Environmental Health Sciences and WHO-Collaborating Centre. She leads the CELSPAC birth cohorts focusing on environmental determinants of health. Dr. Klánová coordinates EIRENE, the European (ESFRI) Infrastructure on Human Exposome, as well as the Group of Earth Observation Initiative GOS4POPs (Global Observation System for Persistent Organic Pollutants). She has been leading multiple large-scale projects from the European Structural and Investment Funds and EU Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe projects in a total value of 80 mil. Euros, and published more than 200 research papers.

Itai Kloog, PhD

Itai Kloog, PhD, is an exposure scientist and geographic information system (GIS) specialist, with expertise in exposure assessment, environmental epidemiology, and geo-statistical modeling.  He holds faculty appointments in the Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and in the Department of Geography at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. His research interests include developing exposure models, geo-statistical analysis, GIS and remote sensing, and evaluation of adverse health effects of exposure to air pollution and temperature extremes. He has published multiple articles in recent years on assessing spatio-temporally resolved PM2.5 and air temperature exposures for epidemiological studies. The novelty of some of the approaches Dr. Kloog uses lies in the ability to ensemble novel hybrid satellite-based GIS and geo-statistical methodologies extending the spatiotemporal scale dramatically compared to the state of the art. Additional research interest include the development and use of low cost sensors (COTS) for environmental epidemiology modeling, the development and validation of mobile devices for collection exposure data and new geo statistical approaches.

Léa Maitre, PhD

Léa Maitre, PhD, is Assistant Research Professor and director of the Exposome hub at ISGlobal in Barcelona, Spain. During her PhD at Imperial College London, she developed novel predictive biomarkers of fetal growth in population studies using metabolomics. Her current research focuses on the application of interdisciplinary research (omics, environmental epidemiology, toxicology) to understand environmental influences on mother and child health, in particular at the molecular level. Her participation in large European projects on this topic included the scientific coordination of the HELIX exposome project (2013-2018) and now participating in H2020 ATHLETE (2020-2024). In 2020, she started the Exposome hub at ISGlobal, initiating a new way to collaborate and communicate about this research. She organized a 3-day online conference (May 28th-30th, 2021), the Exposome Data Challenge, promoting open science and collaboration. Her recent work on the multi-omics signatures of the exposome provides a comprehensive and unique resource to guide future investigation into its biological imprints (Maitre, Bustamente et al. 2022 Nat. Com. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-34422-2).

Milena Maria Maule, PhD

Milena Maria Maule, PhD, is Associate Professor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the University of Turin. She has worked on population-based cancer studies, descriptive, aetiological and quality-of-life studies on childhood cancer, research on Bayesian methods in epidemiology and environmental epidemiology. She collaborates in international projects and is among the coordinators of the Piedmont Childhood Cancer Registry. Among her research topics of interest are causal inference methods, statistical modelling and geostatistics. She is a member of the teaching staff of the summer school of the European Educational Programme in Epidemiology.

Gary W. Miller, PhD

Gary W. Miller, PhD, serves as Vice Dean for Research Strategy and Innovation and Professor of Environmental Health Sciences in the Mailman School of Public Health, and Professor of Molecular Pharmacology and Therapeutics in the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in New York. He completed his PhD in Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Georgia and postdoctoral training in Molecular Neuroscience at Emory University and Duke University. His laboratory studies the role of environmental factors in neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. Dr. Miller founded the first exposome center in the U.S. and wrote the first book on the topic. He has helped develop high-resolution mass spectrometry methods to provide an omic-scale analysis of the human exposome. He is a member of the National Institutes of Health All of Us Research Program Advisory Panel and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Advisory Council. Dr. Miller is the founding editor of the new journal Exposome, published by Oxford University Press.

Tim Nawrot, PhD

Tim Nawrot, PhD, heads the environmental and molecular epidemiology research unit at Hasselt University. He has initiated the ENVIRONAGE birth cohort in the framework of an ERC grant (2012), and he is (or was) part of the EU EXPoSOMICS (FP7), the STOP (H2020), and HBM4EU consortium (H2020). Prof. Nawrot has considerable publications in the field of environmental epidemiology, aging research, and public health. He has fully exploited the arsenal of epidemiology study designs (time-series, case control, case-crossover, and prospective cohort studies) to answer important questions concerning the etiology and/or pathophysiology of a relatively broad spectrum of outcomes including cardiovascular, respiratory, cancer, and perinatal outcomes. He is active in several advisory bodies including the EU summit on air pollution (Vilnius Declaration). He is an editorial board member of Hypertension and editor in chief for children studies for Frontiers in Public Health, and associate editor of Environmental Health.

Chirag Patel, PhD

Chirag Patel, PhD, is Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Patel’s long-term research goal is to address problems in human health and disease by developing computational and bioinformatics methods to reproducibly and efficiently reason over high-throughput data streams spanning molecules to populations. He employs and develops strategies that integrate data sources that capture the comprehensive clinical experience (e.g., through the electronic medical record and biobank scale data), the complex phenomena of environmental exposure (e.g., high-throughput measures of the exposome), and inherited genomic variation. He also is interested in meta–research, the “science of science”, in gauging the robustness of findings from high-throughput studies in increase efficiency of exposomic and genomic discovery. He has current research support from the NIH National Institutes on Aging, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. He received his doctorate in biomedical informatics from Stanford University.

Lauren Petrick, PhD

Lauren Petrick, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health, and Head of Untargeted Metabolomics at the Senator Frank R. Lautenberg Environmental Health Sciences Laboratory at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.  She holds an additional faculty appointment at Sheba Medical Center in Israel. Dr. Petrick is an analytical chemist with advanced training in metabolomics/exposomics and her research interests are in developing exposomics methodologies for environmental health research using high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) and advanced biostatistics/bioinformatics techniques. In addition to performing urine, plasma, and serum analysis, her current work focuses on the development of untargeted methods for matrices such as archived neonatal dried blood spots that allow us to “go back in time” to directly measure early life exposures. Working with prospective samples, her work can establish whether metabolomic/ exposomic signatures exist around the time of birth that predict later life disease. These assays capture both metabolites and exogenous chemicals that represent the human metabolome and internal exposome, thus allowing for “pre-diagnosis” of disease, targeted prevention measures, targeted health monitoring, and early interventions.

Donatella Placidi, MD

Donatella Placidi, MD, is Professor of Occupational Medicine in the Department of Medico-Surgical Specialties, Radiological Sciences and Public Health at the University of Brescia.  Dr. Placidi’s research has focused on worker populations and the health effects of neurotoxic chemicals and the biological mechanisms by which metals, particulate matter, and other toxic chemicals in the environment affect the human nervous system and the interaction of environmental and genetic factors in the genesis of various cancers and neurodegenerative diseases. The translational application of the results of the research to practice is particularly relevant in her contribution to science. Dr. Placidi’s career has included clinical positions in hospital settings, including at the Spedali Civili Hospital of Brescia and the Carlo Poma Hospital of Mantova. She is the Head of the Prevention and Protection Service for the University of Brescia. She is a member of the Italian Society of Occupational Health, the International Commission on Occupational Health, and the Italian Association of Epidemiology. 

Stefano Renzetti, PhD

Stefano Renzetti, PhD, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Department of Medical and Surgical Specialties, Radiological Sciences, and Public Health at the University of Brescia. Dr. Renzetti earned his doctoral degree in Epidemiology, Environment and Public Health at the Department of Clinical Sciences and Community Health, Università degli Studi di Milano in 2021. During his doctoral training he gained expertise in applying and extending novel statistical and machine learning methods to assess the impact of environmental mixture exposures on human health. In 2022 he joined the University of Brescia as Assistant Professor. A current research project is “An exposomic approach for health and sustainable development.” This project aims to develop monitoring systems, quantify and prevent environmental pollution exposures through the study of the exposome. Dr. Renzetti’s research is currently funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research through its program Programma Operativo Nazionale “Ricerca e Innovazione” 2014-2020 (PON R&I FSE-REACT EU), Azione IV.4 “Contratti di ricerca su tematiche dell’innovazione”. 

Joel Schwartz, PhD

Joel Schwartz, PhD, is Professor of Environmental Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Schwartz conducts research on health consequences of exposure to pollutants, including fine particulates and ozone, as well as drinking water contaminants. He has also focused on the health impacts of weather extremes, including the sources of variability in the response to heat and cold. He has used remote sensing and land use regression to estimate exposures, and the application of these exposure estimates to epidemiology. Dr. Schwartz has developed benefit methodologies for assessing the benefits of lead control, and applied those methodologies to the decision to remove lead from gasoline, and, in collaboration with colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control, to a decision to revise CDC screening recommendations for children. Dr. Schwartz holds a PhD from Brandeis University.

Massimo Stafoggia, PhD

Massimo Stafoggia, PhD, is Senior Biostatistician in the Department of Epidemiology at the Lazio Region Health Service in Rome, Italy, and since January 2023, he also is affiliated with Karolinksa Institutet in Sweden as an Adjunct Senior Lecturer. He has contributed to the planning and implementation of several environmental epidemiology studies, at the Italian (SISTI, EPIAIR 1 and 2) and European levels (HEAPSS, AIRGENE, ESCAPE, EXHAUSTION, ELAPSE, EXPANSE), aimed at investigating the relationship between environmental exposures and adverse health outcomes. He has been Principal Investigator of the EU-funded project MED-PARTICLES: “Particles size and composition in Mediterranean countries: geographical variability and short-term health effects” (LIFE10 ENV/IT/000327) and co-P.I. of the Italian projects BEEP: “Big Data in Environmental and Occupational Epidemiology” and BIGEPI: “Use of BIG data for the investigation of the acute and chronic effects of air pollution in the Italian population”.  Recently, he has been involved in several national and international projects aimed at developing spatiotemporal models to predict daily PM concentrations at fine spatial grid in Italy, Sweden, Spain, Switzerland and UK, by use of satellite data. Among these, I am referent of Italy for the NASA-led project MAIA. He holds an MSc in Biostatistics from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a PhD from the Karolinska Institutet.

Douglas I. Walker, PhD

Douglas I. Walker, PhD, Associate Professor in the Gangarosa Department of Environmental Health at Emory University. His research focuses on the continued development and application of advanced analytical strategies for measuring the exposome and characterizing mechanisms underlying environment-related diseases in humans. Dr. Walker leads the Comprehensive Laboratory for Untargeted Exposome Science (CLUES), which was established to provide high-quality, untargeted screening of biological samples for nutrition, precision medicine and environmental health research.

Rick Woychik, PhD

Rick Woychik, PhD, was named Director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Toxicology Program on June 7, 2020, after serving as Deputy Director since 2011. He is a molecular geneticist with a Ph.D. in molecular biology from Case Western Reserve University and postdoctoral training with Dr. Philip Leder at Harvard Medical School. He spent almost 10 years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory rising in the ranks to become head of the Mammalian Genetics Section and then director of the Office of Functional Genomics. In August 1997, he assumed the role of vice chairman for research and professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Case Western Reserve University. In 1998, he moved to the San Francisco Bay area, first as the head of the Parke-Davis Laboratory for Molecular Genetics and then as chief scientific officer at Lynx Therapeutics. He returned to academics as the president and CEO of The Jackson Laboratory in August 2002 and served in that role until January 2011.

Robert O. Wright, MD, MPH

Robert O. Wright, MD, MPH, is a pediatrician, medical toxicologist, and environmental epidemiologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He is the Ethel H. Wise Chair of the Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health, Co-Director of the Institute for Exposomic Research, and Principal Investigator of an ongoing longitudinal birth cohort in Mexico City (Programming Research in Obesity, Growth, Environment and Social Stress–PROGRESS) in collaboration with the National Institute of Public Health, Mexico. He also founded the MATCH (Metals Assessment Targeting Community Health) study in Tar Creek, Oklahoma. Dr. Wright studies chemical mixtures, epigenetics and the role social stressors as modifiers of chemical toxicity. He is an international advocate for research on exposomics—the measure of all health relevant environmental exposures throughout the lifespan. He established the Mount Sinai P30 Core Center grant program that provides support to grow Mount Sinai’s environmental research (in 2022 the Center was renamed the Center on Health and Environment Across the LifeSpan (HEALS).

He has published over 350 research studies and has served on numerous international and national committees and advisory boards. Dr. Wright founded the Senator Frank Lautenberg Laboratory of Environmental Health Sciences at Mount Sinai in 2014 and in 2022 launched the “Exposomic in Precision Medicine” program as part of Mount Sinai’s CTSA. The program is designed to make the environment an integral part of precision medicine initiatives with the goal of bringing it into clinical training as a tool for optimally determining treatment options and variable individual responses to treatment.

Rosalind J. Wright, MD, MPH

Rosalind J. Wright, MD, MPH, is Co-Director at the Mount Sinai Institute for Exposomic Research, Dean for Translational Biomedical Sciences, and the Horace W. Goldsmith Professor in Life Course Health Research in the Departments of Pediatrics and Environmental Medicine and Public Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Dr. Wright is an internationally recognized clinician scientist and life course epidemiologist with transdisciplinary training in molecular biology, environmental health, social determinants, and stress mechanisms. Her background includes transdisciplinary training and expertise in environmental exposure assessment as well as genetics, epigenetics, and psychosocial stress measurement applied to environmental health studies across the life course.

At Mount Sinai, Dr. Wright also is Program Director and Principal Investigator of ConduITS, the Institute for Translational Sciences (the NCATs-funded CTSA), and Director of the Physiological Assessment of Children’s Environmental Risk (PACER) Laboratory. The PACER Laboratory has established and validated protocols that can be implemented to assess functioning of key regulatory systems susceptible to environmental influences from early development through childhood to adolescence. Dr. Wright and her team provide expert consultation on environmental and physiological stress measures to promote a better understanding of social context as a modifier of chemical toxicants.