SOCIALEXPOSOME - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Biology Department / Assistant Professor
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor / Department of Epidemiology / Dalla Lana School of Public Health
- Canada Research Chair in Population Health Equity
Arjumand Siddiqi is Canada Research Chair in Population Health Equity and Associate Professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, where she also holds appointments in the Department of Paediatrics, Faculty of Medicine and the Hospital For Sick Children, as well as at the Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Dr. Siddiqi is interested in understanding how societal conditions produce and resolve inequities in population health and human development across the lifespan. Her research focuses primarily on the roles of resource inequities and social policies, the methods and metrics that enable scientific inquiry on health inequities, and mechanisms related to public and political uptake of evidence. Dr. Siddiqi is an alumnus of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Global Academy and former Associate Member of its Program on Successful Societies. She was also a member of the World Health Organization's Commission on Social Determinants of Health Knowledge Hub on Early Child Development, and has consulted to several international agencies including the World Bank and UNICEF. Dr. Siddiqi received her doctorate in Social Epidemiology from Harvard School of Public Health.
Dr. Siddiqi is interested in social and economic factors that contribute to child health and development, including the biological mechanisms through which this occurs. She is also interested in how social policies influence this process. Finally, she is interested in the statistical methods that can be used to rigorously investigate these questions.
Job Titles:
- Department of Food, Nutrition and Health / Associate Professor
Job Titles:
- Department of Physical Therapy
Job Titles:
- Department of Medicine / Assistant Professor
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- Department of Immunology / Associate Professor
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- Department of Statistics / Assistant Professor
Candice Odger's research focuses on how social inequalities and early adversity influence children's future health and well-being, with an emphasis on how new technologies, including mobile phones and web-based tools, can be used to understand and improve the lives of young people.
Dr. Odgers was a William T. Grant Scholar and the recipient of early career awards from the American Psychological Association, the Society for Research in Child Development, the Royal Society of Canada, and the Association for Psychological Science. In 2015 she was awarded the Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest Early Career Award and, in 2016, the Jacobs Foundation Advanced Research Fellowship.
Research interests: developmental and quantitative psychology, social inequalities, child health, adolescent health
Job Titles:
- Director of the Emory Exposome Research Center
- Professor
Carmen Marsit is the Director of the Emory Exposome Research Center, a US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences funded P30 Core Center dedicated to developing and supporting environmental health research focused on the exposome. He leads a multi-disciplinary research program focused on defining biological mechanisms underlying the role of the environment on human health, particularly focused on the developmental origins of children's health and disease. He incorporates state-of-the-art high-dimensional genomic and epigenomic tools to define how environmental factors, ranging from toxic trace metals to adversity and psychosocial stress, use unique and shared biological responses to affect health and may provide insights into novel prevention and intervention strategies.
Research interests: genomics, epigenetics, environmental health, child health and development
Job Titles:
- Chairman, Professor and Co - Director of the Foundations of Health Research Centre
Dr. Kuzawa is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology and The Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. He uses principles from anthropology and evolutionary biology to gain insights into the biological and health impacts of human developmental plasticity. His primary field research is conducted in Cebu, the Philippines, where he and his team work with a large birth cohort study that enrolled more than 3,000 pregnant women in 1983 and has since followed their offspring into adulthood (now 30 years old). They use 35+ years of data available for each study participant, and recruitment of generation 3 (the grandoffspring of the original mothers), to gain a better understanding of the long-term and intergenerational impacts of early life environments on adult biology, life history, reproduction, and health. A theme of much of his work is the application of principles of developmental plasticity and evolutionary biology to issues of health. More recent work is exploring the evolutionary and health implications of the high energy requirements of childhood brain development. Kuzawa is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences (US) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Colter Mitchell's research focuses on the causes and consequences of family formation behavior. Dr. Mitchell examines how social context such as neighborhood resources and values influence family processes and how those processes interplay with an individual's genetic and epigenetic makeup to influence behavior, well-being, and health. His research also includes the development of new methods for integrating the collection and analysis of biological and social data.
Research interests: social determinants of health, gene-by-environment interactions, epigenetics, child health and development
Job Titles:
- Department of Psychology
- Professor and Canada Research Chair in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience
Daniel Ansari received his PhD from University College London in 2003. Presently, Daniel Ansari is a Professor and Canada Research Chair in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Psychology and the Brain & Mind Institute at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, where he heads the Numerical Cognition Laboratory (www.numericalcognition.org). Ansari and his team explore the developmental trajectory underlying both the typical and atypical development of numerical and mathematical skills, using both behavioral and neuroimaging methods.
Dr. Rehkopf is an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Primary Care and Population Health and in Health Research and Policy at Stanford University. He is a social epidemiologist who studies how federal, state and local policies exacerbate or diminish socioeconomic and racial/ethnic inequalities in health. In order to answer these questions, he examines the potential benefits of additional biological information (genotype, telomere length, DNA methylation) for understanding the links between changes in the environment and chronic disease. He received a Masters degree in Epidemiology and Biostatistics from University of California, Berkeley, and his Doctorate from the Harvard School of Public Health.
Job Titles:
- Department of Medical Genetics / Assistant Professor
Job Titles:
- Department of Pediatrics / Associate Professor
Job Titles:
- Canada Research Chair in Policies and Health Inequalities at McGill University
- Professor
Dr. Amélie Quesnel-Vallée holds the Canada Research Chair in Policies and Health Inequalities at McGill University, where she is a Professor with an Arts and Medicine cross-faculty appointment in the Departments of Sociology and of Epidemiology. She is also the founding Director of the McGill Observatory on Health and Social Services Reforms, an initiative of the Institute for Health and Social Policy and the Department of Family Medicine.
She obtained her MSc at Université de Montréal, and her PhD in Sociology from Duke University. Her research examines the contribution of social policies to social inequalities in health over the life course and received numerous awards from professional associations including the Population Association of America, the American Sociological Association and the American Public Health Association. She is also a two-time recipient of the Fulbright Canada Foundation awards (Doctoral fellowship 1999; Distinguished Chair in Quebec Studies, 2020). Her work appeared in a book she co-edited, Le privé dans la santé : Les discours et les faits (Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 2008), as well as in journals such as the Lancet, the Canadian Medical Association Journal, the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, the American Journal of Epidemiology and Social Science and Medicine.
She has consulted for Statistics Canada and Health Canada, and she was a member of Statistic Canada's National Statistics Council. She is a Past-President of the International Sociological Association Research Committee on the Sociology of Health.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Associate Professor at the University of Vienna
Dr. Benedikt Warth is an Associate Professor at the University of Vienna, where he founded the ‘Global Exposomics and Biomonitoring Laboratory' in 2017.
Before returning to Austria, he was an Erwin-Schrödinger fellow at The Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California where he developed and applied novel metabolomics technology to research questions in the fields of systems toxicology, cancer research, and exposure science.
His current research focus is in the area of omics-scale exposure assessment and analytical food chemistry to better understand the in vivo and in vitro effects of environmental and food contaminants. He has received nine scientific awards including the Young Investigators Award and the Feigl-Prize from the Austrian Society of Analytical Chemistry.
Dr. Warth is interested in chemical exposures that might contribute to child health and development and the resulting biological/toxicological effects which he investigates at the systems-level.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver Ca
Dr. Eli Puterman is an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver Canada. He has been appointed a Canada Research Chair in Physical Activity and Health by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (2015-2025) and received a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Scholar Award (2016-2021). He completed his graduate training in Health Psychology at UBC (Supervisor: Dr. Anita DeLongis) and postdoctoral work at the Centre for Health and Community in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco (Mentors: Drs. Elissa Epel, Nancy Adler).
His research seeks to develop, evaluate, and disseminate physical activity programs and initiatives among hard-to-reach populations, and incorporates psychological and biological markers of health and wellbeing measured both within laboratory and in situ settings, using mobile technologies for program delivery and evaluation of program delivery. He is currently completing several randomized trials, including a depression and burnout reduction exercise program using mobile technologies for healthcare workers, a dance program for women living with HIV, and a ball hockey program for military veterans (co-PI Mark Beauchamp).
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Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Department of Psychiatry
Dr. Erin C. Dunn is a social and psychiatric epidemiologist with expertise in genetics and epigenetics. Her research laboratory uses interdisciplinary approaches to better understand the social and biological factors that influence the etiology of depression among women, children, and adolescents. The goal of her work is to identify the causal mechanisms underlying risk for depression, translate that knowledge to population-based strategies for prevention, and target those strategies to "sensitive periods" in development. Sensitive periods are high-risk/high-reward stages in the course of the lifespan when experience, whether exposure to adversity on the one hand or health-promoting interventions on the other, can have lasting impacts on brain health. Through her efforts to determine when these sensitive periods occur, her goal is to design interventions that not only promote brain health across the lifespan, but are also uniquely timed to minimize the consequences of stress exposure, prevent depression before it onsets, and make the most efficient use of limited public health dollars. Dr. Dunn is currently an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and is affiliated with the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard, and the Henry and Allison McCance Center for Brain Health at MGH. She has led several genetic association studies and gene-environment interaction studies that were the first of their kind, including publishing some of the first genome-wide association studies of depression risk in non-European ancestry populations and the first genome-wide environment interaction study of depression. Her research has been recognized by the Anxiety and Depression Association of America through the Donald F. Klein Early Career Investigator Award and the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation through the Gerald R. Klerman Award, Honorable Mention. She is a 2017 recipient of a National Institute of Mental Health-funded Biobehavioral Research Award for Innovative New Scientists (BRAINS). In 2018, she was awarded a Rising Star award from One Mind. In 2020, Dr. Dunn received a research mentoring award from the Department of Psychiatry at MGH. Dr. Dunn is a first-generation college student.
Job Titles:
- Adjunct Assistant Professor / Department of Pediatrics, School of Population and Public Health
Dr. Hind Sbihi is a senior epidemiologist at the Office of the Public Health Officer in the BC Provincial Ministry of Health. She is also an Adjunct Professor in the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia. Formerly, she was a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Stuart Turvey's lab at the BC CHildren's Hospital Research Institute. Her research focused on the human health effects of the built environment (air pollution, natural spaces, microbiome) with a growing interest in identifying intervention strategies to reduce exposures and improve health. Transforming plausible mechanistic insights into effective applications for the prevention of pediatric allergic diseases such as asthma was the focus of her postdoctoral training.
Sbihi received postdoctoral fellowships from the BC Children's Research Institute Mining for Miracles program, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research. Throughout her PhD, her research was supported by the CIHR Banting and Best doctoral award, the four year UBC doctoral fellowship and the Killam Pre-doctoral fellowship. In 2011, she received the David Bates Scholarship, a British Columbia air quality fund, which recognizes graduate students in the field of environmental and air quality sciences.
Job Titles:
- Department of Psychology
- Professor
Dr. Ian H. Gotlib is the David Starr Jordan Professor, Director of the Stanford Neurodevelopment, Affect, and Psychopathology (SNAP) Laboratory, and Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. From 2005-2010, Dr. Gotlib served as Senior Associate Dean for the Social Sciences, and he served as Chair of the Psychology Department from 2012-2018. He received his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Waterloo.
In his research, Dr. Gotlib examines psychobiological factors that place individuals at increased risk for developing depression and engaging in suicidal behaviors, as well as processes that are protective. More specifically, Dr. Gotlib examines neural, cognitive, social, endocrinological, and genetic factors in depressed individuals and applies findings from these investigations to the study of predictors of depression and suicidal behaviors in children at risk for this disorder. In related projects, Dr. Gotlib is also examining the differential effects of early life stress on trajectories of neurodevelopment in children through puberty in an effort to explain the increased prevalence of depression and suicidal behaviors in girls in adolescence. Finally, Dr. Gotlib is extending this work to the study of brain function and structure, endocrine function, and behaviors in neonates and infants being raised in suboptimal environments.
Dr. Gotlib's research is supported largely by grants from the National Institutes of Health. He has also been funded by the National Health Research Development Program and the Medical Research Council of Canada. Dr. Gotlib has received the Distinguished Investigator Award from the National Alliance for Research in Schizophrenia and Affective Disorders, the Joseph Zubin Award for lifetime research contributions to the understanding of psychopathology, the APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution, the APS Distinguished Scientist Award, and a MERIT award from NIMH. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the American Psychopathological Association, and is Past President of the Society for Research in Psychopathology.
Dr. Jenny Tung is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Evolutionary Anthropology and Biology at Duke University and a Faculty Associate of the Duke University Population Research Institute. Research in her lab uses genetic and genomic tools to shed light on behavioral and evolutionary questions. Dr. Tung's projects primarily focus on populations for which she can combine genetic analysis with data on the behavior, life history, and environmental milieu of known individuals. This approach enables the connection of behavioral and environmental effects on trait variation in individuals, to evolutionary outcomes on the level of populations and species. It also provides the opportunity to study the role of gene regulation in explaining social environmental effects on fertility, health, and survival across the life course, in mammalian models for human health.
Much of the research in her lab focuses on a population of baboons in the Amboseli ecosystem of Kenya, which has been the subject of research by the Amboseli Baboon Research Project for almost 50 years. She also studies rhesus macaques in captivity and, through a collaboration with the Kalahari Meerkat Project, meerkats and Damaraland mole rats in South Africa.
Research Interests: social behaviour, gene regulation, genetic variation, evolutionary biology, social status, immune function
Job Titles:
- Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology and Special Education
- Professor
Dr. Kimberly Schonert-Reichl is an Applied Developmental Psychologist and a Professor in the Human Development, Learning, and Culture area in the Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia (UBC). She is also the Director of the Human Early Learning Partnership (HELP), an interdisciplinary research unit focused on child development in the School of Population and Public Health in the Faculty of Medicine at UBC. She received her MA in Educational Psychology from the University of Chicago, her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Iowa, and completed her postdoctoral work as a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Fellow in the Clinical Research Training Program in Adolescence at the University of Chicago and the Department of Psychiatry at Northwestern University Medical School. Prior to her graduate work, Dr. Schonert-Reichl worked as middle school teacher and then as a teacher at an alternative high school for "at risk" adolescents.
Known as a world renowned expert in the area of social and emotional learning (SEL), Dr. Schonert-Reichl's research focuses on identification of the processes and mechanisms that foster positive human qualities such as empathy, compassion, altruism, and resiliency in children and adolescents. Her projects include studies examining the effectiveness of classroom-based universal SEL programs including such programs as the Roots of Empathy, MindUp, the Taxi Dog Educational Curriculum, and the Kindness in the Classroom Curriculum. Dr. Schonert-Reichl is also conducting interdisciplinary research in collaboration with neuroscientists, psychobiologists, and molecular geneticists to examine the ways in which school-based preventative SEL interventions "get under the skin" and result in changes in self-regulation and biological processes (including stress physiology and epigenetic change) among children in typical classroom settings. She has led the development of the implementation of the Middle Years Development Instrument (MDI), a child self-report population measure of 4th and 7th grade children's social, emotional, and physical well-being and developmental assets inside and outside of school. To date, almost 90,000 children have completed the MDI in British Columbia. The MDI is also being implemented in Australia, Germany, the UK, and Croatia, and work is currently underway for MDI implementation in the US and across Canada.
Research Interests: population health, social and emotional learning, child development, education
Dr. Maria Aristizabal was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia working with Dr. Michael Kobor and the University of Toronto working with Dr. Marla Sokolowski. She is an expert in molecular biology with an emphasis on transcription regulation and epigenetic modifications. She has utilized yeast and flies to study mechanisms of transcription regulation in response to environmental perturbations. She has experience with a wide range of molecular techniques including gene expression microarrays, ChIP-chip and associated analysis methods. Her work will identify genes and histone modifications that change in response to food deprivation, and how these are modulated by natural genetic variation, developmental stage, and sex.
Dr. Nicole (Nicki) Bush is an Associate Professor in the UCSF departments of Psychiatry and Pediatrics. She is the Director of Research for the Division of Developmental Medicine.
Dr. Bush's research focuses on the manner in which early social contexts interface with individual differences to affect developmental trajectories across the life course. She examines how socioeconomic, parental, and environmental risks for maladaptive behavior and developmental psychopathology are modulated by individual differences in children's temperamental, neurobiological, and genetic reactivity to stress. She also investigates the ways in which contextual experiences of adversity become biologically embedded by changing children's developing physiologic systems and epigenetic processes, thereby shaping individual differences that mediate and moderate the effects of context on trajectories of development and mental health.
Her research has examined relations among biobehavioral predispositions (e.g., temperament and physiology) and stressful life circumstances (e.g., poverty, parenting, and neighborhood) in the prediction of a broad range of children's mental health outcomes. In recent years, Dr. Bush has expanded her examination of contextual risk effects by infusing her models with a new understanding of biology (physiology, genetics, epigenetics) throughout early development, including the prenatal period. Her work integrates insights from social epidemiology, sociology, clinical psychology, and developmental psychobiology to elucidate the interplay of biology and context in youth development, as physiological systems mature and social environments change. Her examinations of how social disadvantage interacts with and alters children's biological stress response systems aim to clarify the etiology of children's mental and physical health outcomes and subsequent adult health.
Noha is an Assistant Professor in the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry at Western University in London, Ontario. She is a dentist and an oral pathologist, with interdisciplinary training in laboratory medicine and pathobiology, social epidemiology and population health. Noha completed her PhD at the Faculty of Dentistry, University of Toronto in a Collaborative Program in Public Health Policy with the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. Passionate about the "biology of social adversity", her doctoral work characterized innate immunophenotypes associating with adverse socioeconomic exposures and psychosocial stress. Noha completed postdoctoral research at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Noha's postdoctoral research integrated social epigenomics and neuroimaging data to understand the impact of early life adversity and stress on neurodevelopment. In pursuit of this work, she received the Restracomp Award from SickKids Research Institute. With the purpose of translating research to policy, Noha has worked on projects in collaboration with the provincial ministry of health and other policymakers to design evidence-based programs for the delivery of uninsured health services to children from low-income families and refugees to Canada. Ultimately, Noha hopes that her work can be geared towards developing evidence-informed, precision child health approaches that can help vulnerable children and their families.
Research interests: social inequalities, child health, neurodevelopment, social epigenetics, pain, stress
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Associate Professor at the University of Cincinnati
- Department of Pediatrics
Dr. Tesfaye Mersha is currently an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati in the Department of Pediatrics. Dr. Mersha has received a Faculty Research Achievement Award from Cincinnati Children's, the African Professionals Network (APNET) Business and Professional Achievement Award, a Keystone Symposia Early Career Investigator Award. His career in genetics and research began with an interest in understanding the interplay between biology and the environmental conditions that contribute to disease. Over time, he has broadened his research interests to include genomics, genetic ancestry, racial disparities, personalized medicine and bioinformatics.
One of his areas of expertise is multi-omics (genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, microbiome, proteomics and metabolomics). He has worked to integrate multi-omics with statistical genetics and bioinformatics methods to uncover the molecular architecture of medical conditions, such as asthma and asthma-related allergic diseases.
The Mersha Lab performs a variety of computational and applied data analysis projects, including the development of statistical and genome informatics tools that enable multiethnic admixture, genome-wide association and omics integration studies of biomedical traits. Their goal is to develop an in-depth understanding of the intricate interactions between genomic variations and environmental exposure in the etiology of complex diseases - and then translate these findings into clinical practice through collaborations with clinicians.
Dr. Mersha and colleagues have made several significant contributions to the field of genetic research. For example, in 2018, they filed a patent for their invention, "Methods for Diagnosing and Managing Treatment of Atopic Dermatitis." Additionally, their web-based bioinformatics tool called AncestrySNPminer was the first of its kind; it retrieves ancestry-informative markers (AIMs) with divergent allele frequency/selection pressure from genomic databases. Other novel bioinformatics tools they've developed include GENEASE, SAGE, AdmixPower, MI-MAAP, PAMAM and AllergyGenDB. Their work has been published in many peer-reviewed medical journals, including The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Scientific Report (Nature research journal), Genetics (Genetics Society of America), Frontiers in Immunology, PLOS ONE, Bioinformatics, Frontiers in Genetics and BMC Genomics. Dr. Mersha's article, "Genome-wide Analysis Revealed Sex-Specific Gene Expression in Asthmatics", was published by Human Molecular Genetics on August 1, 2019.
Job Titles:
- Department of Psychiatry / Associate Professor
Dr. Chen is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Chair, Professor and Co-Director of the Foundations of Health Research Centre as well as a member of The Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. Dr. Chen's research seeks to understand why low socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with poor physical health outcomes in children, such as asthma. In particular, she focuses on examining the underlying psychological and biological mechanisms that explain these relationships. She is also interested in questions of resilience-that is, why some children who come from adversity manage to thrive and maintain good profiles of health, and also what the limits are of this resilience. Her work also examines how having a mentor impacts on the health and well-being of low-SES mentees, in addition to determining how being a mentor has a positive effect on the mentor's own health.
For her research, Dr. Chen has received honors including the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Health Psychology, the Young Investigator Award from the Society of Behavioral Medicine, and the Donald K. Routh Early Career Award from the Society of Pediatric Psychology.
Job Titles:
- Chairman of the Steering Committee
- UBC Healthy Aging Chair - a President 's Excellence Chair
Esha Gill is an undergraduate co-op student completing her B.Sc in Biology. Currently, she is research coordinator of the UBC Social Exposome Cluster.
Dr. Bidlack is currently an instructor in the Department of Developmental Biology at Harvard School of Dental Medicine. Additionally, Dr. Bidlack is an associate member of staff at the Forsyth Institute. Dr. Bidlack completed her PhD in Hominid Paleobiology at The George Washington University. Her current research involvements include using teeth as biomarkers for neurodevelopment, using teeth as a new tool to predict exposure to early life adversity and future risk for brain disease, as well as decoding the hidden link between eczema and caries among children.
Job Titles:
- Senior Researcher & Study Coordinator
Job Titles:
- Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Department of Microbiology and Immunology
Job Titles:
- Member of the Steering Committee
- Department of Psychiatry, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health
Professor Evans is an environmental and developmental psychologist interested in how the physical environment affects human health and well being among children. His specific areas of expertise include the environment of childhood poverty, children's environments (housing, schools, playgrounds, toys), cumulative risk and child development, environmental stressors, and the development of children's environmental attitudes and behaviors.
Job Titles:
- Department of Epidemiology and Public Health
Dr. Miller is co-director of Foundations of Health Research Center and the Louis W. Menk Professor at Northwestern University, where he has appointments in Department of Psychology, Institute for Policy Research, and Department of Medical Social Sciences. After receiving a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, he completed a clinical internship at Western Psychiatric Institute & Clinic, followed by a post-doctoral fellowship in health psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. Before joining Northwestern in 2012, he was a faculty member at Washington University in St. Louis from 2000 to 2003 and at the University of British Columbia from 2003 to 2012.
Dr. Miller's research examines the behavioral and biological mechanisms through which stress affects health. His current research is supported by grants from the the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Previous studies have been supported by the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation (NARSAD), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Michael Smith Foundation, the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, and the American Heart Association.
Research Interests: stress, stress-health connections, poverty, immune system, asthma, cardiometabolic disease
Job Titles:
- Department of Medical Genetics
Job Titles:
- Member of the Steering Committee
- Department of Chemistry / Assistant Professor
Job Titles:
- Professor of Medicine at McGill University
Job Titles:
- Senior Researcher & Study Coordinator
Janine's research aims to understand the genetic and epigenetic mechanisms underlying the well-known associations of early-life exposures and later health. As Principal Investigator (PI) for Epigenetics in the Generation R Study, Janine uses epigenome-wide and genome-wide data from Generation R, working mostly within large-scale international consortia, such as the PACE (Pregnancy And Childhood Epigenetics) Consortium, with over 30,000 participants, in which she is the senior lead investigator on multiple projects. She is also the PI of the 6-partner international NutriPROGRAM Consortium, which studies early-life nutrition, DNA methylation and childhood cardiometabolic outcomes. Next to these, Janine is the work package lead for several Horizon2020-funded projects (DynaHEALTH, LifeCycle, LONGITOOLS) and the study coordinator of the Generation R Study.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Steering Committee
- Department of Medical Genetics
Job Titles:
- BC Children 's Hospital Research Institute, Department of Statistics / Assistant Professor
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Department of Pathology
Job Titles:
- Adjunct Assistant Professor
Lisa completed a PhD in the Department of Medical Genetics at the University of British Columbia in 2018. Her research focused on understanding population genomics and epi-genomics related to the aging across the human life course, which led to >25 peer-reviewed publications during her Doctorate degree as well as a number of scholarships and awards. She developed a passion for biostatistics and analyzing health-related data through this research and pursued a position with Island Health in Victoria, BC, where she is now a Clinical Data Consultant in Decision Support. Her role is centred on harnessing the utility of clinical data, such as those collected from the electronic health record, to support decision-making purposes within the Health Authority. She is passionate about the field of Clinical Data Science and hopes to continue to contribute to this area through academic teaching, knowledge translation, and collaborative research activities.
Magdalena is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences and Offord Centre for Child Studies at McMaster University where she holds the Ontario Chair in Early Child Development. She has associate appointments in the Departments of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and Family Medicine, and is a faculty member in the Graduate program in Health Research Methodology.Magdalena is also an affiliate Associate Professor at the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia.
Magdalena has an MSc from Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, and a PhD from Cambridge University in the UK, where she studied early development of non-human primates. She completed a post-doctoral training at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, where she studied psychosocial adjustment of young children with chronic illness and their siblings.
Since joining the Offord Centre for Child Studies at McMaster in 1997, Magdalena, together with the late Dr. Dan Offord, developed the Early Development Instrument (EDI), a measure of children's readiness to learn at school entry. This initiative has generated interest at national and international levels, from academic and social policy perspectives. Magdalena and her team support the implementation of the EDI in Canada, and its adaptation in many international sites. She has also been serving as a consultant with many international organizations, including the World Bank, WHO, UNICEF, and UNESCO on the measurement and indicators of early child development. Magdalena is a core member of the WHO-led group developing and testing in multiple countries a new measurement indicators for children aged 0-3 years, and a UNESCO/UNICEF-led group (Measuring Early Learning Quality and Outcomes, or MELQO) on measurement of school readiness for 3-7 year-olds through multiple informants (direct assessment, parent, teacher).
Magdalena's research interests broadly address factors influencing children's developmental trajectories, with more specific focus on early health predictors of later outcomes, transition to school, with a particular emphasis on children with special needs, communities' engagement in children's early development and health. She serves as an investigator on a number of grants and awards. Currently, together with colleagues from UBC and several other universities in Canada, Magdalena is involved in two CIHR-funded research projects on social determinants of health for typically-developing children (Pan-Canadian Social Determinants of Children's Developmental Health Study) and for children with special needs and health disorders (Canadian Children's Health in Context Study, CCHICS).
Job Titles:
- Adjunct Assistant Professor
Job Titles:
- Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology
- Professor
Professor Melissa Wake (MBChB, FRACP, FAHMS, MD, GradDip Obst & Gynae) is a paediatrician, community child health researcher, and Director of the Generation Victoria (GenV) initiative, led from the Murdoch Children's Research Institute. Her goals are to speed up children's research and to test interventions that change children's care. She is known for her many randomised trials and her leadership of major data resources, including the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children's biophysical module (the Child Health CheckPoint). She chairs the Children's Digital Health Collaborative National Research Advisory Group.
Job Titles:
- Department of Pediatrics / Associate Professor
Job Titles:
- Professor of Medicine at McGill University
Michael Meaney is a James McGill Professor of Medicine at McGill University, Director of the Sackler Program for Epigenetics & Psychobiology at McGill University and currently Director, Translational Neuroscience Program at the Singapore Institute of Clinical Sciences. Dr. Meaney was trained in Clinical Psychology and Neurobiology. His research interests lie in early environmental regulation of gene expression and brain development. Dr. Meaney seeks to understand how early experience exerts a sustained influence on neuronal function and the risk for psychopathology. His research involves models systems as well as longitudinal human cohort studies.
Research interests: epigenetics, early experience, child development, neurodevelopment, social influences affecting neurodevelopment
Job Titles:
- Director of the Jacob 's Center for Productive Youth Development
- Professor
Michael Shanahan is the Director of the Jacob's Center for Productive Youth Development. He studied sociology and child development at the University of Minnesota and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has held professorships at Penn State University and UNC-Chapel Hill and was a Hewlett Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford (1998/1999). His main research interests include life course sociology theory and methods, with a focus on individual differences in the life course, particularly genetic factors.
Research interests: life course sociology, molecular genetics, gene-environment interactions, effects of social experiences on child health and development
Nicole Gladish's background involves broad training from molecular biology techniques to bioinformatics. She received an Advanced Diploma from St. Lawrence College in Biotechnology, completed a BSc. in Biology from UBC, completed her PhD in Medical Genetics at UBC, and was a former student in the Kobor Lab. Her thesis research investigates the impact of early life adversity, such as low socioeconomic status and abuse, and how DNA methylation associates with these experiences to help understand why these individuals are predisposed to later life pro-inflammatory adverse health outcomes such as cardiovascular disease, type II diabetes and cancer. Nicole is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University under Dr. David Rehkopf, an affiliate SEC member. Outside the lab she enjoys spending time with her husband and three small children, and reading whenever she gets the chance.
Job Titles:
- Department of Oral Health Sciences / Associate Professor
Job Titles:
- Department of Pediatrics / Assistant Professor
Sara Mostafavi completed her PhD in computer sciences from the University of Toronto and her postdoctoral training at Stanford University. Her research is focused on developing and applying machine learning and statistical methods to study the genomics of complex diseases, with a particular interest in psychiatric disorders. She is especially interested in developing models for combining association evidence across multiple types of genomic data, such as gene expression and genotype data, and modeling prior biological pathways and networks for disentangling spurious from meaningful correlations.
Research interests: computational and synthetic biology, machine learning, artificial intelligence, neuropsychiatric disorders, gene-by-environment interactions
Job Titles:
- Department of Psychiatry / Associate Professor
Job Titles:
- Member of the Steering Committee
- Research Director
Job Titles:
- Adjunct Assistant Professor
- Department of Educational
Job Titles:
- Department of Epidemiology / Associate Professor
Dr. McDade is the Director of the Laboratory for Human Biology Research, the Director of Cells to Society (C2S): Centre on Social Disparities and Health and Director of the Graduate Cluster in Society, Biology, and Health. He is also a Fellow of the Child and Brain Development program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced research. Dr. McDade's work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and he was a 2002 recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).
Job Titles:
- Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology and Special Education
Job Titles:
- Member of the Steering Committee
- Division of Organizational Behaviour and Human Resources
Job Titles:
- Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology