For over a decade, PRHE has mentored dozens of environmental health scientists, most of whom have gone on to play significant roles in the field. We spoke to four of them about their PRHE postdoc experience, what they’re doing now, and what changes they think are needed in environmental health.
During the course of these interviews, Ami Zota was moving from George Washington University to Columbia University while leading Agents of Change in Environmental Justice, Juleen Lam was teaching at California State University, East Bay, responding to industry attacks on science, and having a baby, (welcome to the world Ethan!), Stephanie Eick was balancing the release of multiple papers while thinking of new directions to take her research, and Julia Varshavsky was juggling new PFAS research, an NIH grant proposal, and this interview.
We asked them the same five questions and have listed their responses in the order of their PRHE postdoc dates.
Ami Zota (PRHE’s 2nd postdoc 2009–2013)
Q. Why did you want to do your postdoc with PRHE?
I was very interested in their unique approach of doing science, clinical care, and policy. There was a big emphasis on not just doing good science but translating the science towards action. And I really wanted to be in the Bay Area, so it was a great fit. I had worked with Rachel Morello-Frosch during my first postdoc and she introduced me to Tracey [Woodruff]. I had already worked on flame retardants with Silent Spring Institute and I had published a paper showing high levels of PBDEs in dust in California homes, so PRHE was a great fit.
Q. What was your research focus?
Tracey and I did a study characterizing environmental mixtures in pregnant women (Environmental Health Perspectives). It’s been cited over 800 times, so it’s become a mainstay in the field. I did a lot of the flame retardant work, both science and policy, working with the firefighters and environmental justice advocates, to change fire safety standards so they are more protective of human health without using chemical flame retardants. Then I got a K99 career development award from NIH while I was there which allowed me to stay an additional two years and I focused on chemical and non-chemical stressors and perinatal outcomes.
Q. Did you have any research breakthroughs or surprises?
Quite a few! We published a lot of important science because we did the chemical mixtures in pregnant women from the U.S. and then I led an analysis with Tracey and Antonia Calafat where we looked at the trends of phthalates over a 10-year period and we found that those phthalates that had been subject to policy interventions had declined but the replacements had increased, so that was another big paper that got a lot of media attention and became a mainstay in the field. I think my PBDE work, some was before PRHE and some after, but collectively that led to 14 publications, some of which is well cited, but more importantly informed policy changes in California eventually.
What surprised me is learning that good science alone is not enough to make change. Working with the media is really important to getting it out. People have to know about your science. It’s not enough to just do the science. You have to educate people about your findings.
Q. What are you doing now?
I am working to advance environmental justice and health equity thru science advocacy, communications, and training the next generation of scientists. I’m transitioning from a tenured professor at GW (George Washington University Milken Institute of Public Health) to a faculty position
at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health in June. Agents of Change in Environmental Justice is a nationwide program I created that seeks to empower early career scientists from traditionally marginalized backgrounds and amplify their voices, stories, and their research.
Q. What changes do you hope to see in environmental health science moving forward?
We need new ideas and I think those new ideas are there. We want to change the face of thought leadership in environmental health and climate health science, and that’s what I am trying to do through Agents of Change. These early career scientists, particularly from systematically marginalized backgrounds, have innovative and important ideas that come, in part, from their lived experience. We just need to amplify and support them.
Juleen Lam (2015-2018)
Q. Why did you want to do your postdoc with PRHE?
PRHE was my first choice because of the inspiring people there worked at the forefront of children’s environmental health research. These were the scientists whose names were on so many of the research papers I read throughout my graduate studies and while working on my dissertation, and I was honored to have the opportunity to come work alongside them and to learn from the best in the field! At the time, PRHE was paving the way for new methods in systematic review and risk assessment, and I was excited to apply my own research areas and expertise to addressing these critical changes that could have a significant impact on how we develop and implement environmental health policies in the U.S. and around the world.
Q. What was your research focus?
My research focused on environmental health, risk assessment, and environmental health policy. My dissertation focused on developing new methods to conduct quantitative risk assessment to determine whether exposures to environmental chemicals were truly harmful, and if so at what levels in order to better inform the setting of environmental health policies such as regulatory standards. This aligns exactly with PRHE’s mission and focus and was one of the reasons why I was most excited about coming to work with this research group.
Q. Did you have any research breakthroughs or surprises?
One of the main projects I worked on at PRHE was developing systematic review methodology specifically tailored for environmental health and using these approaches to inform environmental health policies. At the time, this seemed to be mostly an academic exercise and I didn’t foresee much traction in the environmental policy realm. However, much to our surprise many organizations quickly latched on to the idea of systematic review and began promoting these methods as the gold standard for evaluating the scientific evidence and informing policymaking. Within a few years, systematic review was appearing in more places than we could imagine – the National Toxicology Program, U.S. EPA, California EPA, National Academy of Sciences, and even in legislative language in Toxic Substances Control Act reform! It was really surprising to us, but a welcome reminder that there are many great environmental health scientists working in health policy that are trying to do the right thing to protect public health.
Q. What are you doing now?
I am an Assistant Professor at California State University, East Bay (CSUEB) in the Department of Public Health and continuing my research in environmental health, risk assessment, health disparities, and environmental health policy issues and also teaching undergraduate classes. I love teaching 
and working with CSUEB undergraduate students in my research because they are genuinely excited about learning about environmental health, and most of them have real-world and career experiences that enrich the experience for other students as well as myself! I am constantly learning from my students and getting to see the different perspectives they each bring.
Q. What changes do you hope to see in environmental health science moving forward?
Although it sometimes doesn’t feel like it, we have seen a lot of progression in environmental health over the past several decades. Yet, there is still much to be done. One of the things I hope to see is a greater focus on vulnerable populations that truly need our protection such as children, the elderly, and people living in communities constantly battling environmental injustices. This means more than just considering these populations when setting environmental regulations, but actually factoring in their vulnerabilities, access to healthcare and resources, co-existing morbidities and co-exposures when developing policies. Only when we are protecting the most vulnerable among us do we start to achieve our ultimate goal of public health protection.
Julia Varshavsky (2017-2020)
Q. Why did you want to do your postdoc with PRHE?
I knew for a long time that I wanted to do my postdoc or work at a place like PRHE – an academic research center focused on environmental impacts on reproductive and developmental health that was also translational and trans-disciplinary. PRHE is unique in that it communicates the science to health care providers and patients, which is essential. So not just doing the research but translating the research into action to have a real-world impact.
Long before my postdoc, I helped to establish PRHE around 2007 when I was working at the Collaborative on Health and the Environment before grad school, where I took over Allison Carlson’s role, which was really big shoes to fill [Allison Carlson was one of PRHE’s founders]. I was there for the birth of it, in a sense.
Q. What was your research focus?
I was focused on looking at PBDEs, PFAS, and OPFR exposures during mid-gestation in the Women’s Options Center (WOC) study, women that were seeking elective terminations during second trimester of pregnancy, which is a very small and rare study population. PRHE examines the relationship between PBDEs in maternal and fetal tissues and the relationship between PBDE and PFAS exposure and OPFR to biomarkers of placental development and function.
Q. Did you have any research breakthroughs or surprises?
The most interesting findings were that the fetus is just as exposed – same levels or higher – in the fetal tissues as the mom during the second trimester, which is surprising and important as it confirms that PBDEs, which are neurotoxic chemicals, are crossing the placenta and accumulating in the fetus during this really important time period for fetal brain development.
Q. What are you doing now?
I am an Assistant Professor of Environmental Health at Northeastern University where I am continuing to collaborate with PRHE to recruit pregnant women so that we can look at PFAS exposures in the mom versus the fetal liver and then look at the biomarkers and levels of inflammation. I am also part of the faculty of the Social Science Environmental Health Research Institute (SSERI) directed by Phil Brown, which is an inter-disciplinary institute that facilitates collaboration between environmental health scientists and social scientists. One of our three working groups, the
PFAS Project Lab, is hosting the PFAS Tox Database – an online evidence map of all studies related to PFAS exposures and includes over 1100 human and animal studies and in-vitro studies – a main part of my work. We’ve gotten great feedback on it from many of our colleagues who work on PFAS in the U.S. and abroad. There have been over 22,000 views of the database since we launched it – public-health decisionmakers, EPA staff, advocacy groups, and community groups who are working on PFAS remediation. We’re using the database now to do a systematic review of PFAS and gestational diabetes and hope to do systematic reviews on PFAS and cancer and many more.
Q. What changes do you hope to see in environmental health science moving forward?
Increased awareness and understanding and practical applications of methods to incorporate non-chemical social stressors or drivers of environmental health disparities. We really need to incorporate methods to study social factors that increase people’s susceptibility to disease, experiences with racial discrimination or systemic racism, occupational exposures, things that can impact your disease risk in combination with chemical exposures. We need to get better about how we capture social factors and study them and how we implement that in risk assessment for susceptible groups.
Stephanie Eick (2019-2021)
Q. Why did you want to do your postdoc with PRHE?
I was really interested in the work Tracey and Rachel were doing and PRHE was a nice extension of my dissertation. I had a lot of ideas for the future but wasn’t sure how to execute. A postdoc with PRHE allowed me to explore those ideas. I also liked that I would be part of a postdoc team and not by myself. My fellow postdocs pushed me to think about my research in ways I wouldn’t have otherwise and many of them have become subsequent collaborators.
Q. What was your research focus?
I worked on the Chemicals in Our Bodies cohort, which was an
ECHO study children’s cohort, looking at PFAS and the effects of PFAS on pregnancy and looking at interactions with psychosocial stress.
Q. Did you have any research breakthroughs or surprises?
Yes! What I found really interesting were how the non-chemical or psychosocial stressors make effects of chemicals even worse. PFAS levels are higher among higher educated people, but the relationship between PFAS and outcomes are stronger among people experiencing stress, even among people who we would think are better off due to education and income.
What most surprised me about non-chemical stressors and health disparities is how pervasive the problem is – how badly we’re exposed to PFAS and other chemicals. I really didn’t understand the scope of the problem and how our government is doing nothing about it. It led me to make many changes in my personal life because of what I learned. At the end of the day, individuals can only do so much, so policy change is essential.
Q. What are you doing now?
I am an Assistant Professor on the tenure track at the Emory Rollins School of Public Health, in environmental health and epidemiology, so I’m continuing a lot of the work I was doing at PRHE. I am still working on the Chemicals in Our Bodies cohort and thinking about how to expand this work in new directions. I submitted two new grants to explore PFAS and pregnancy outcomes in new directions, thinking about new mechanistic pathways, and I’m working with MPH and PhD students, which is really awesome. They help me with data analysis and it’s really fun to help mentor the next generation of environmental health scientists.
Q. What changes do you hope to see in environmental health science moving forward?
We need to be thinking about social inequities – social inequities are environmental inequities – they go together. Social determinants of health are environmental determinants of health. We don’t live in a vacuum with a single exposure. We need to think about chemical mixtures and think more broadly about the definition of the environment, as also our neighborhood, societal pressures, clothes, food, all influence our chemical exposure patterns and should be included in our definition of the environment.
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