PI Crash Course: Skills for Future or New Lab Leaders

Dr. Re is a neuroscientist focused on investigating environmental risk factors and mechanisms for neurodegenerative diseases. The overarching goal of Dr. Re's research is to make an impact in therapy and prevention of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and other neurodegenerative diseases through innovative and rigorously designed mechanistic and biomarker studies. Since she started her faculty appointment, she has developed a novel line of animal- and human model-based experimental research linking environmental exposures and in particular metals and pesticides to the late-onset paralytic disorder ALS. Dr. Re's work is at the forefront of complex and poorly understood gene-environment (GxE) interactions in the etiology of ALS and, more recently, Parkinson's disease. Overall, her independent research to date has primarily focused on five complementary topics: 1) Novel therapeutic candidates for ALS; 2) Novel biomarkers of environmental exposure and disease progression in ALS; 3) Genuine GxE interactions in ALS; 4) Molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying neuromuscular aging; and 5) Neurotoxic risks from exposure to electronic cigarette aerosol. Dr. Re's research work is supported by funding from notably the NIEHS, NIA, CDC/ATSDR, and DOD.

Since 2018, Dr. Re is the Director of the ""Fundamentals of Toxicology for Health-Related Disciplines"" course that aims at introducing the basic concepts of toxicology to students from multiple health-related fields (epidemiologists, policy makers, etc.) who are interested in public health and the environmental basis of human disease. She is also the Director of a 2-day professional development workshop the ""PI Crash Course: Leadership and Management Skills for Future or New Lab Leaders"" as part of her efforts to cultivate the next generation of scientific leaders.

Joan A. Casey received her doctoral degree from the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2014. Dr. Casey is an environmental epidemiologist who focuses on environmental health, environmental justice, and sustainability. Her research uses large secondary health datasets, such as electronic health records, to study the relationship between emerging environmental exposures and population health across the lifecourse. She also considers vulnerable populations, joint social and environmental exposures, and health disparities, particularly in an era of climate change. Dr. Casey investigates a range of exposures including wildfires, power outages, ambient temperature, the built environment, fossil fuel infrastructure, and concentrated animal feeding operations.

From 2014-2016, Dr. Casey was a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar, and from 2019-2022, she was the co-chair of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology North American chapter. She also serves as an editorial board review member for Environmental Health Perspectives. Dr. Casey also holds a BS in Biological and Environmental Engineering from Cornell University and an MA in Applied Physiology from Teachers College at Columbia University.

Jeanine Genkinger, PhD, is a cancer epidemiologist who has been driven to understand how modifiable factors, molecular pathways and related biomarkers may impact cancer risk and progression, particularly for rare but highly fatal cancers. Her research interests include prevention through determining modifiable risk factors and improved early detection through identifying markers of risk and molecular pathways to offer the most promising approaches to reducing morbidity and mortality of these diseases. Her area of methodological specialty is in nutritional epidemiology, longitudinal design and complex pooled and meta-analytic techniques.

As co-director of the HICCC Database Shared Resource, she recruits all high-risk and cancer patients into a registry, along with the collection of blood, saliva, and an epidemiologic questionnaire to link to resected tumor tissue and clinical data to promote research across the HICCC and CUMC.

Dr. Genkinger has conducted her research in large scale international consortia, namely the Pooling Project of Prospective Studies of Diet and Cancer and the NCI Cohort Consortium, and has conducted research in numerous cohort studies, such as the Breast Cancer Family Registry.

Her research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute, and the American Institute for Cancer Research (AICR). Dr. Genkinger was awarded R01 funding to examine epigenetic markers as early detection markers of ovarian cancer. Recently, she was funded by AICR to examine dietary and lifestyle patterns and weight changes with pancreatic cancer risk.

Dr. Perzanowski's research is focused on understanding exposures that lead to allergic sensitization and asthma.  His expertise is in environmental epidemiology with research focused on understanding environmental exposures that lead to allergic sensitization, asthma and airway inflammation. His group's current research is exploring paradigms of exposures related to asthma disparities in an area of the world with a high prevalence of asthma, low-income neighborhoods in NYC. He leads a productive field and laboratory based molecular epidemiology research group.  His group is conducting the NIH (NIEHS), HUD, CDC and ASPR supported NYC Neighborhood Asthma and Allergy Study that is examining neighborhood differences in asthma prevalence and persistence to better understand the great disparity in asthma risk seen between children living just city blocks apart. A major focus of Dr. Perzanowski's research efforts is the implementation of non-invasive measurements of airway inflammation in pediatric population studies. Another current focus is the investigation into the role of early-life dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system in the risk for exercise-induced asthma later in childhood and how this pathway could be contributing to disparities in emergency department visits for asthma. Dr. Perzanowski is actively involved in the EHS community, including the ECHO program where he serves on several committees, is a scientific advisor to the data management group and is a co-investigator with three cohort studies. He has been an active member and leader in Columbia's NIEHS Center for Environmental Health and Justice in Northern Manhattan (CEHNM) as an active Community Engagement Core member and a leader of the Allergen and Bioaerosol lab. He has also been actively involved in community engagement around environmental health disparities, including current HUD and NIEHS funded studies investigating the efficacy of a large-scale mold remediation intervention in NYC public housing in reducing asthma morbidity. Dr. Perzanowski is the Vice Chair for Education and Training in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences and is the Director of the MPH Core Curriculum.

Ana Navas-Acien is a Leon Hess Professor and Chair of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health. She is a physician-epidemiologist (MD, University of Granada, Spain '96) with a specialty in Preventive Medicine and Public Health (Hospital La Paz, Madrid '01) and a PhD in Epidemiology (Johns Hopkins University '05). Her research investigates the health effects of environmental exposures (metals, tobacco smoke, e-cigarettes, air pollution), molecular pathways and gene-environment interactions, and effective interventions for reducing involuntary exposures and their health effects. She serves as PI of environmental studies in multiple studies including the Strong Heart Study, a study of cardiovascular disease and its risk factors in American Indian communities, the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA), a study of cardiovascular, metabolic and lung disease in urban settings across the US; the Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy 2 (TACT2), a clinical trial about the benefits of metal chelation; the VapeScan Study, a study of young adults from New York City; and India-FOCUS, a study evaluating risk factors for chronic kidney disease of unknown origin as part of the CURE consortium. Her goals are to contribute to the reduction of environmental health inequalities in underserved and disproportionately exposed populations.

Robert O. Wright, MD, MPH, is a pediatrician, medical toxicologist, and environmental epidemiologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He is the Ethel H. Wise Chair of the Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health, Co-Director of the Institute for Exposomic Research, and Principal Investigator of an ongoing longitudinal birth cohort in Mexico City (Programming Research in Obesity, Growth, Environment and Social Stress--PROGRESS) in collaboration with the National Institute of Public Health, Mexico. He also founded the (Metals Assessment Targeting Community Health) MATCH study in Tar Creek, Oklahoma. 

In September 2018, he joined the National Advisory Environmental Health Sciences Council (NAEHSC), a Congressionally mandated body that advises the secretary of Health and Human Services, the director of NIH, and the director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) on matters relating to the direction of research, research support, training, and career development supported by the NIEHS.

Dr. Wright studies chemical mixtures, social stressors as a modifier of chemical toxicity, and the role of genetics/epigenetics in modifying or mediating chemical toxicity. He is an international advocate for research on exposomics—the measure of all health relevant human exposure throughout the lifespan. He has published over 200 research studies and has served on numerous international and national committees and advisory boards. Dr. Wright founded the Senator Frank Lautenberg Laboratory of Environmental Health Sciences at Mount Sinai in 2014 and in 2020 launched the Laboratory for Innovation in Exposomic Precision Medicine. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan Medical School and completed residency in Pediatrics at Northwestern University, as well as the following fellowships: Emergency Medicine, (Brown University), Medical Toxicology (Harvard University), Environmental Epidemiology, (Harvard University) and Genetic Epidemiology (Harvard University). Finally, he also established the Mount Sinai Transdisciplinary Center on Early Environmental Exposures—a NIH funded Core Center grant program that provides infrastructure support to Mount Sinai environmental researchers.

Adana A. M. Llanos, PhD, MPH (she/her) is a tenured Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health and Co-Leader of the Cancer Population Science (CPS) Program at the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center at Columbia University. As a cancer/molecular epidemiologist and health equity scholar her research investigates the causes and contributors to cancer outcomes inequities, considering the social and structural drivers of health and their impact on biomarkers and mechanisms that ultimately lead to carcinogenesis and cancer progression.

Dr. Llanos has established a multidisciplinary research program that has three broad objectives: (1) to evaluate and understand molecular and sociobiologic/biosocial/biopsychosocial mechanisms that underlie cancer inequities; (2) to apply this knowledge to improve cancer survival outcomes among populations with a disproportionately high cancer burden; and (3) to evaluate the contributions of chemical exposures from personal care products on risk and outcomes of hormone-related conditions, including breast cancer, and develop evidence-based interventions to mitigate these risks. In recognition of her impactful, innovative research, Dr. Llanos has received numerous awards and honors, including a Buckeyes under 40 Award (2016, The Ohio State University Black Alumni Society), Minority Faculty Scholar Award (2018, American Association for Cancer Research), Excellence in Research Award (2018, New Jersey Health Foundation), an Emerging Scholar Award (2021, Diverse: Issues in Higher Education), an Emerging Leader Award (2023, Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center), and a CURE Shining Star Award from the Center to Reduce Cancer Health Disparities at the National Cancer Institute (2023, NCI).

In addition to her academic research, scholarship, teaching, and mentoring, Dr. Llanos is actively involved in service to the field and the university, as well as through engagement with non-profit organizations whose mission includes providing timely public health advocacy, education, outreach, and cancer survivorship support, particularly organizations serving racial and ethnic minority and medically underserved communities.