Podcasts about niehs

(Conversation recorded on January 21st, 2025)   Many of us are familiar with the problem of plastics as a distant issue in the ocean, primarily affecting fish and sea turtles. While these environmental effects are critical, the full scope of plastic's repercussions on human health and well-being is largely unknown by most people, even as the research shows alarming – and growing – adverse effects. What do we need to know about this pervasive material and how it affects the human body?  Today, Nate is joined by environmental health researchers Leo Trasande and Linda Birnbaum, as well as environmental policy advocate Christina Dixon, to discuss the harmful effects of plastic on human health and the ongoing global policy efforts to regulate the plastic and petrochemical industries. Their conversation dives into the risks of frequent plastic exposure, paths toward a world with reduced plastics use, and what it might mean for the economy if we made – or did not make – significant changes to the ways we use plastic. How can we balance the requirement for essential plastics with the urgent need to reduce our production and consumption of these toxic materials? What further unknown health effects are still in need of research - especially in the case of thousands of untested chemicals used on the market? Lastly, what is the current state of regulation on plastic production and consumption, and how can everyday citizens play a role in shaping the future of the plastic industry?    About Leo Trasande: Dr. Leo Trasande is the Jim G. Hendrick MD Professor, Director of the Division of Environmental Pediatrics, and Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Pediatrics at NYU School of Medicine. He also serves on the faculty of the NYU Wagner School of Public Service and the NYU College of Global Public Health. Leo is an internationally renowned leader in environmental health. His research focuses on the impacts of chemicals on hormones in our bodies. He has also led the way in documenting the economic costs for policy makers of failing to prevent diseases of environmental origin proactively.   About Linda Birnbaum: Linda S. Birnbaum, Ph.D., D.A.B.T., A.T.S, was director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) of the National Institutes of Health, and the National Toxicology Program (NTP) from 2009 to 2019. As board certified toxicologist, Linda also served as a federal scientist for 40 years, including 19 years at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), where she directed the largest division focusing on environmental health research. Birnbaum is now a Special Volunteer at NIEHS and conducts research as part of the Mechanistic Toxicology Branch. In October 2010, she was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, one of the highest honors in the fields of medicine and health.    About Christina Dixon: Christina Dixon is a campaign leader at the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) in the UK, using policy, advocacy, and corporate campaigning skills towards environmental issues. Christina currently leads the EIA's plastics treaty campaign, where she oversees a diverse and highly skilled team of legal, policy and campaigning experts combating plastic (over)production & pollution, waste trade, commercial whaling, illegal marine species trade, and bycatch.    Please note that, starting with this episode, Reality Roundtables will be released on Mondays going forward.   Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the whole story of The Great Simplification? Watch our 30-minute Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future Join our Substack newsletter Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners  

In this episode of The Future Conceived, Dr. Yu-Ying Chen, postdoctoral fellow at NIEHS and member of the SSR Virtual Education Committee, sits down with Dr. Francesco DeMayo, the 2024 recipient of SSR's highest honor, The Carl G. Hartman award. Dr. DeMayo is the the Chief and Senior Investigator in the Reproductive and Developmental Biology Laboratory at the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS / NIH). Listen in as Dr. DeMayo discusses his career trajectory, his research in uterine biology and gives some words of wisdom for the next generation of reproductive biologists.

The NIEHS Superfund Research Program (SRP) is hosting a Risk e-Learning webinar series focused on using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to advance environmental health research. The series will feature SRP-funded researchers, collaborators, and other subject-matter experts who aim to better understand and address environmental health issues by applying AI and machine learning approaches to complex issues. Recent advances in AI and machine learning methods show promise to improve the accuracy and efficiency of environmental health research. Over the course of three sessions, presenters will discuss how they use AI and machine learning approaches to improve chemical analysis, characterize chemical risk, understand microbial ecosystems, develop technologies for contaminant removal, and more. In the first session, AI & ML Applications to Understand Chemical Mixtures, Properties, and Exposures and their Relationship to Human Health, speakers will discuss how they apply machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques to understand chemical exposures and their effects on human health. To learn about and register for the other sessions in this webinar series, please see the SRP website. Naomi Halas, Ph.D., and Ankit Patel, Ph.D., will share updates on their work combining surface-enhanced spectroscopies (Raman and Infrared Absorption) with machine learning algorithms with the goal of developing simple and ultimately low-cost methods for the detection and identification of environmental toxins. As part of their discussion, they will share several approaches, including the use of machine learning algorithms to detect individual constituents in complex mixtures and the use of facial recognition strategies to identify specific chemical toxins in human placenta. Jacob Kvasnicka, Ph.D., will present on a project he supported while he was a postdoctoral researcher at Texas A&M University SRP Center's Risk and Geospatial Sciences Core. There, his work involved developing an ML framework for predicting safe exposure levels to chemicals to avoid cancerous and reproductive/developmental effects. Most chemicals lack toxicity data related to human health, and this study uses ML to fill this gap, greatly expanding the ability to characterize chemical risks and impacts. Trey Saddler will give attendees an overview of ToxPipe — a platform for performing retrieval augmented generation (RAG) over toxicological data. Comprised of a web interface, agentic workflows, and connections to various data sources, ToxPipe enables toxicologists to explore diverse datasets and generate toxicological narratives for a wide range of compounds. Speakers:Naomi Halas, Ph.D., and Ankit Patel, Ph.D., Rice UniversityJacob Kvasnicka, Ph.D., U.S. Environmental Protection AgencyTrey Saddler, NIEHS, Division of Translational ToxicologyModerator: David Reif, Ph.D., NIEHS, Division of Translational Toxicology To view this archive online or download the slides associated with this seminar, please visit http://www.clu-in.org/conf/tio/SRP-ML-AI1_110424/

The NIEHS Superfund Research Program (SRP) is hosting a Risk e-Learning webinar series focused on using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to advance environmental health research. The series will feature SRP-funded researchers, collaborators, and other subject-matter experts who aim to better understand and address environmental health issues by applying AI and machine learning approaches to complex issues. Recent advances in AI and machine learning methods show promise to improve the accuracy and efficiency of environmental health research. Over the course of three sessions, presenters will discuss how they use AI and machine learning approaches to improve chemical analysis, characterize chemical risk, understand microbial ecosystems, develop technologies for contaminant removal, and more. In the first session, AI & ML Applications to Understand Chemical Mixtures, Properties, and Exposures and their Relationship to Human Health, speakers will discuss how they apply machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques to understand chemical exposures and their effects on human health. To learn about and register for the other sessions in this webinar series, please see the SRP website. Naomi Halas, Ph.D., and Ankit Patel, Ph.D., will share updates on their work combining surface-enhanced spectroscopies (Raman and Infrared Absorption) with machine learning algorithms with the goal of developing simple and ultimately low-cost methods for the detection and identification of environmental toxins. As part of their discussion, they will share several approaches, including the use of machine learning algorithms to detect individual constituents in complex mixtures and the use of facial recognition strategies to identify specific chemical toxins in human placenta. Jacob Kvasnicka, Ph.D., will present on a project he supported while he was a postdoctoral researcher at Texas A&M University SRP Center's Risk and Geospatial Sciences Core. There, his work involved developing an ML framework for predicting safe exposure levels to chemicals to avoid cancerous and reproductive/developmental effects. Most chemicals lack toxicity data related to human health, and this study uses ML to fill this gap, greatly expanding the ability to characterize chemical risks and impacts. Trey Saddler will give attendees an overview of ToxPipe — a platform for performing retrieval augmented generation (RAG) over toxicological data. Comprised of a web interface, agentic workflows, and connections to various data sources, ToxPipe enables toxicologists to explore diverse datasets and generate toxicological narratives for a wide range of compounds. Speakers:Naomi Halas, Ph.D., and Ankit Patel, Ph.D., Rice UniversityJacob Kvasnicka, Ph.D., U.S. Environmental Protection AgencyTrey Saddler, NIEHS, Division of Translational ToxicologyModerator: David Reif, Ph.D., NIEHS, Division of Translational Toxicology To view this archive online or download the slides associated with this seminar, please visit http://www.clu-in.org/conf/tio/SRP-ML-AI1_110424/

Zhanghua Chen, PhD is an environmental epidemiologist and biostatistician with multidisciplinary expertise in environmental health, biostatistics, epidemiology, clinical medicine, obesity and diabetes pathophysiology, genomics, metabolomics, and data science. She has a strong track record in environmental health research with particular interests in the health effects of early-life environmental exposures in children and adults, the epidemiology of diabetes and obesity, and methods of multi-omics studies.Chen aims to contribute her research to early prevention and treatment of complex diseases. She is creative, collaborative and highly productive. She is establishing a novel research area in environmental epidemiology by leveraging the advanced metabolomics and multi-omics approaches. Chen is the principal investigator on the NIEHS-supported K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award: “Metabolomic Signatures Linking Air Pollution, Obesity and Diabetes”. She has also published many papers in well-received medical journals such as Diabetes Care and American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. Her accomplishments in environmental health research have received wide media attention from national and international news agencies, e.g., Reuters and Xinhua News Agency.Learn more about this episode and others at keck.usc.edu/pphs/podcastStay in the loop - subscribe to the Preventive Dose newsletter for monthly news straight to your inbox.Follow us on social - find us at @uscpphs Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn X YouTube

Eating Heart Healthy with Dr. Dawn Brewer, PhD, RD Dr. Brewer is the Core Leader of the Community Engagement Core for the NIEHS-funded University of Kentucky Superfund Research Center. She is currently the Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Dietetics and Human Nutrition and previously served as the Director of the Didactic Program in Dietetics (DPD) for the department. She is a Registered Dietitian and conducts community-engaged research to increase the quantity and variety of fruit and vegetable consumption using community interventions that intervene at multiple levels of the Social Ecological Model for health behavior change. She is a member of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the Kentucky Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, Public Health/Community Nutrition Practice Group, the Healthy Aging Practice Group and the Nutrition Educators of Health Professionals. Dr. Brewer & Rob Discuss: Her career journey in nutrition Her own experience with making small steps towards big lifestyle changes Foods that make the heart happy How to make frozen vegetables tasty and easy Why dietary pattern big pictures counts more than small variations How she sneaks vegetables into her children's diets Her best purchase for less than $30 in 2023 The Elevate Yourself Podcast is brought to you in partnership with Athletic Brewing. Use code ELEVATE30 for 30% OFF your first online order at checkout!

From cleaning dishes in a lab, to engineering, to medical school, to senior principal investigator of the "Reproductive Medicine Group" at NIEHS, listen to the amazing scientific journey of Dr. Carmen Williams, the recipient of the 2023 SSR Trainee Mentoring Award. This podcast also features Dr. Miranda Bernhardt, who, before becoming the Director of the Animal Production Core and Assistant Research Professor at the Center for Reproductive Biology at Washington State University, was a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Williams's lab from 2011 to 2017. Mentors are themself first and foremost mentees that keep on learning throughout their career, from others, including their trainees, and from their own experience along the way.

 Can pesticides cause diseases such as Parkinson's? Today's guest is Dr. Beate Ritz who will help answer this question during today's interview.  Dr. Ritz has been investigating the connection between exposure to pesticides and the incidence of Parkinson's disease for more than 15 years. She Professor and Vice Chair of the Epidemiology Department and holds co-appointments in the Environmental Health department at the UCLA School of Public Health and in Neurology, UCLA School of Medicine; she is a member of the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health (COEH), the Southern California Environmental Health Science Center (SCEHSC) and co-directs the NIEHS-funded UCLA Center for Gene-Environment Studies of Parkinson's disease.  She has spent the past 15 years investigating the long-term effects of pesticide exposures on Parkinson's disease and cancers and is currently conducting a project to implement a Parkinson's disease registry required by a new law in California. Her research focuses on the health effects of occupational and environmental toxins such as pesticides, ionizing radiation, and air pollution on chronic diseases including neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders (Parkinson's disease, autism cognition), cancers, and adverse birth outcomes and asthma. She previously investigated the causes of cancer in chemical toxin and radiation exposed workers and assessed the impact of ergonomic work-place factors on musculo-skeletal disorders. For more than two decades, she studied the effects of air pollution on adverse birth outcomes as well as asthma, autism, and cancers in children in Southern California.