Hosting a conference is a great honor, and everyone at the George Washington University and the Milken Institute School of Public Health (Milken Institute SPH) is looking forward to the National Association of Science Writers conference that will be held at GW on October 12-16 this year.
Thanks to our school's strong reputation for environmental epidemiology research and the efforts of Melissa Perry, professor and chair of the Milken Institute SPH’s Department of Environmental and Occupational Health (EOH), the annual conference of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE) will be held at GW and hosted by the Milken Institute SPH in August 2020. The event will bring together scientific experts and practitioners from academia, government, industry, and non-governmental organizations dedicated to the protection of health and environment.
Carlos Santos-Burgoa, MD, MPH, PhD of the Milken Institute SPH’s Department of Global Health and Pauline Mendola, PhD of the National Institutes of Health’s Epidemiology branch will co-chair the conference along with Perry. Santos-Burgoa is the principal investigator of the recently published independent report estimating that 2975 excess deaths in Puerto Rico resulted from Hurricane Maria last year.
The successful bid to host the conference builds on the Milken Institute SPH’s strong tradition of bringing students, faculty and staff to the annual event to present their research. This year, at least ten Department of Environmental and Occupational Health faculty, students, alumni and staff members traveled to Canada’s capital city, Ottawa, to attend the conference.
Perry’s credits her success convincing the ISES-ISEE to hold the conference at the Milken Institute School of Public Health in two years to our school’s leadership in public health and our nationally recognized environmental, climate and sustainability programs. “Many of our campus initiatives resonate strongly with the various domains of interest to environmental epidemiology and ISEE members,” she says. Additionally, she points out, “the Washington, DC, metropolitan area is home to a wide range of epidemiologists working in academia, government and the private sector. The city is leading the country in a number of environmental and sustainability initiatives including climate resiliency and urban agriculture. Washington is also home to some of the nation’s top museums, dining and entertainment.”
At this year’s conference, Professor Ami Zota, ScD, MS co-chaired the Environmental Justice and Women’s Health session. She also gave a talk titled “Environmental Phthalates Exposure and Measures of Uterine Fibroid Size among a Racially Diverse Population of Premenopausal Women.”
Posters presented by Milken Institute SPH faculty, staff, students and alumni at the department included:
- Courtney Irwin (a former Global Environmental Health MPH student who is now in the school’s Epidemiology and Biostatistics program) and Karisma Nagarkatti (a student in the Public Health Microbiology and Emerging Infectious Diseases MS program), presented “Sperm Aneuploidy in a Birth Cohort of Faroese Men Exposed in Utero to p,p-DDE and PCBs”
- Alexander Lindahl (Environmental Health Science & Policy (EHS&P) MPH ’18), presented “Neighborhood Scale Health Impacts from PM2.5 in Four United States Metropolitan Areas”
- Suril Mehta (DrPH student) presented “Prenatal Persistent Halogenated EDCs and Gestational Glucose Levels in a Racially Diverse Pregnancy Cohort of Overweight Women”
- Laura Neumann (research associate) presented “Mitochondrial DNA Damage in Spermatozoa of Faroese Men Exposed to Organochlorines”
- Anne Riederer (an EOH professorial lecturer who is also affiliated with the University of Washington) presented “Indoor and Outdoor Residential Ammonia Concentrations in a Low-Income Cohort of Children with Asthma in an Area of Intensive Agricultural Production”
- Brianna VanNoy (research associate and EHS&P MPH ’18 alumna) presented “Breastfeeding as a Predictor of Serum Concentrations of Per- and Polyfluorinated Alkyl Substances in Reproductive-Aged Women and Young Children: A Rapid Systematic Review”
From left to right, the faculty, students and staff who attended the ISES-ISEE conference in Ottawa this year shown in the photo above are Karisma Nagarkatti, Brianna VanNoy, Melissa Perry, Laura Neumann, Alex Lindahl and Courtney Irwin.