EOH Faculty, Staff, and Students in Brazil


October 5, 2015

Associate Professor Sabrina McCormick, Assistant Professor Amanda Northcross, Research Associate Susanna Mitro, and DrPH Student Deise Galan all recently made trips to Brazil.

Northcross and Mitro attended the ISEE (International Society for Environmental Epidemiology) conference held in São Paulo, Brazil, where they gave oral presentations.  Northcross gave an oral presentation on some of her work on the health impacts from cooking fires, “Evaluating the ability of an ethanol stove to reduce exposures to PM2.5 in urban Nigeria.”

Mitro gave two oral presentations about research being conducted by Assistant Professor Ami Zota’s group. The talks were titled "Cross-sectional associations between exposure to persistent organic pollutants and leukocyte telomere length among US adults: National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 2001-2002" and "Fast food consumption: a potential source of phthalates exposure among the US population." 

McCormick and Galan, who is originally from Brazil and earned her MPH at GW, visited the Amazon to collect data for McCormick’s project investigating how the country can achieve sustainable energy development to help combat the impacts of climate change. Their travels took them to the state of Pará, where the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam is under construction.  McCormick is an experienced filmmaker who has spent a great deal of time in Brazil and speaks Portugese, and she also directed a film inspired by the dam project during her stay.