The Department of Public Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai is pleased to announce the appointment of Damaskini (Dania) Valvi, MD, MPH, PhD, as Vice Chair for Research and Education and Director of Graduate Education in Public Health. This newly created role reflects Mount Sinai’s commitment to modernizing public health education and research to meet the growing challenges faced by patients, communities, and society at large.
In her new leadership roles, Dr. Valvi will oversee the design and implementation of innovative educational and research initiatives, modernize curricula for public health-related graduate programs, and strengthen partnerships with community organizations, health care professionals, academic departments, and research institutes across Mount Sinai and with national and international collaborators. Her work will ensure that Mount Sinai’s education and research efforts continue to align with best practices and advance the institution’s mission of improving health outcomes through evidence-based education, research, and community outreach.
Dr. Valvi joined the Icahn School of Medicine in 2019 as an Assistant Professor of Environmental Medicine and Public Health and co-Director of the MS in Epidemiology program within the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 2023. She is a member of both the Institute for Exposomic Research and the Institute for Liver Disease at Mount Sinai. Prior to her tenure at Mount Sinai, Dr. Valvi served as a research scientist at ISGlobal in Spain and at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Environmental Health. Her academic credentials include an MD from the University of Crete Medical School in Greece and an MPH and PhD in Biomedicine-Epidemiology from Pompeu Fabra University in Spain.
Since joining Mount Sinai, Dr. Valvi has been instrumental in assembling interdisciplinary research teams, advancing collaborative projects across departments, and building partnerships with national and international academic institutions. Her research in public health, environmental epidemiology, exposomics, metabolic diseases, and maternal and child health has been recognized with multiple grant awards from the National Institutes of Health and leading European funding agencies. She has authored or coauthored over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles, achieving an H-index of 48 with over 34,000 citations to date.
Dr. Valvi has demonstrated a strong commitment to training the next generation of epidemiologists and public health leaders, mentoring nearly 30 master’s, predoctoral, and postdoctoral trainees, including students from Mount Sinai’s MS in Epidemiology and MPH programs. She has also overseen the development and academic operations of the MS in Epidemiology program. In her expanded role, Dr. Valvi will lead the continued integration, modernization, and innovation across all public health master’s and PhD programs at Mount Sinai.
With her extensive experience in both research leadership and educational innovation, Dr. Valvi is uniquely positioned to advance Mount Sinai’s public health mission. Congratulations to Dr. Valvi on her well-deserved appointment.