PRHE announced earlier in February that Dr. Amy Padula, a leading PRHE researcher who was named one of 20 Pioneers under 40 in Environmental Health by the Collaborative on Health and the Environment and received a NIEHS Outstanding New Environmental Scientist R01 Award for her work on wildfire smoke and preterm birth, will serve as PRHE’s new interim director.
Dr. Padula received her PhD in epidemiology from UC Berkeley and was a postdoc and instructor at Stanford University in pediatrics and neonatology. She was a PRHE Reach the Decisionmakers fellow who worked with EPA to strengthen air pollution policy, currently serves as a scientific advisor for the California Biomonitoring Program, and leads the EaRTH Center’s Postdoctoral Training Program.
We spoke with her about why she got into science, the focus of her research, and her plans for PRHE.
Q: Why did you want to become a scientist?
From a very young age I was drawn to science because I always wanted to understand how things work and how to fix them when they’re not working. Both my parents were in medicine – Dad was a surgeon and Mom a nurse – so dinner conversations were typically about health. I was always interested in what makes people healthy and what goes wrong when people’s health goes south.
Q: What is the focus of your research?
Most of my research is around environmental exposures during pregnancy and how they impact maternal and child health. I study everything from air pollution to chemicals, from traffic-related pollution to wildfire smoke and many other types of environmental exposures.
I’ve been focused on pregnancy because this period of life matters so much for both women’s and children’s health; because pregnancy is a rapid time of development it’s an important time to see how exposures are having an adverse impact on health.
Q: What has most surprised you in your research?
One thing I’ve been surprised about is how consistently we find environmental factors linked to adverse birth outcomes. For example, preterm birth is strongly associated air pollution and chemicals and yet that link is not generally accepted by the public and physicians as a risk factor. It’s surprising that even when the research is consistent, it’s not more accepted and that action is not taken to improve the environment to reduce adverse birth outcomes.
But this is one of the things we are focused on at PRHE so I am very excited to lead this work moving forward, find new ways to communicate this work and translate our findings into policy solutions that will improve health and lives, especially for children.
Q: What are the biggest challenges facing science and scientists right now?
It is certainly an overwhelming time right now, especially for scientists. We’re facing attacks on research funding and attacks on science as a discipline especially for us in environmental epidemiology and prenatal epidemiology. We’re also facing attacks on the integrity of scientists whose work is trying to improve people’s health. It’s hard to pinpoint where it’s coming from. It feels like a huge political force, but it’s also coming from corporate greed, political greed, and corruption. I think there’s even more going on threatening science on a basic human level on the distrust in science and scientists even when they aim than to improve people’s health.
Q: How do you envision the future of PRHE?
While these are challenging times on many levels, it is also an exciting time for us to evolve and grow and amplify the wide range of expertise our team offers. We plan to reignite our connections with clinicians in OB/GYN to expand our research into communities. We want to expand our work identifying and tackling environmental threats to both local communities and vulnerable communities. We are meeting with new partners to strengthen our work on the links between climate and reproductive health, and we are exploring exciting new research directions. And given the policy relevance of all the research we do, of course, we are developing new initiatives to turn our science into policy action.
We have a lot of work ahead of us, but we have a fantastic team that is rolling our sleeves up and doing what we can to improve pregnancy outcomes and children’s health.
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