Manish Arora, BDS, MPH, PhD
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Manish Arora, BDS, MPH, PhD, an environmental epidemiologist and exposure biologist, is the Edith J. Baerwald Professor and Vice Chairman of the Department of Environmental Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. A founding member of the Mount Sinai Institute for Exposomic Research, Dr. Arora serves as director of its environmental exposure and precision environmental medicine laboratories, leading a team of over 50 scientists who are advancing research in a vast array of diseases that are national health priorities.

Dr. Arora’s research focuses on the effects of prenatal and early life chemical exposures on life-long health trajectories. In 2020, he and colleagues proposed the “Biodynamic Interface Theory,” a novel theoretical framework that explains how the environment interacts with physiology in a dynamic way over time. This theory has the potential to shift the paradigm of environmental health research from a static to a more nuanced dynamic view of health throughout the life course. In Dr. Arora’s own research, environmental dynamic principles paved the way for his groundbreaking work on the tooth and hair biomarker to reconstruct the timing of exposure to various harmful chemicals and essential nutrients during pregnancy, and the biological response to those environmental factors.

Felicitas Bidlack, PhD
ADA Forsyth Institute

Dr. Bidlack is Professor and Senior Director of Research Affairs at the ADA Forsyth Institute. She studied Biology at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany, and obtained her PhD in Hominid Paleobiology from The George Washington University in 2003. Her doctoral work explored the time resolution of tooth enamel as proxy record using a histology based micro-sampling strategy of teeth and the use of an animal model. Her postdoctoral training at the Forsyth Institute in Boston, MA, focused on in-vitro studies of tooth enamel matrix proteins and their role in calcium phosphate crystal formation. Dr. Bidlack has developed a unique expertise for chemical, proteomic, and imaging analyses of teeth. She applies her deep appreciation for the mechanisms and timing of tooth enamel formation to unlock the information that teeth record of health history and exposures during the life span.

https://forsyth.org/team_member/felicitas-bidlack/

Complete List of Published Work in MyBibliography:  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/myncbi/felicitas.bidlack.1/bibliography/43608330/public/?sort=date&direction=descending

Matthew W. Gillman, MD, SM
Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program, National Institutes of Health

Dr. Matthew W. Gillman joined the National Institutes of Health in 2016 as the inaugural director of the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program in the Office of the Director, National Institutes of Health (NIH). He joined NIH from Harvard Medical School where he was a professor of population medicine; he was also professor of nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health.

Dr. Gillman has a background in the fields of epidemiology, pediatrics, and internal medicine. He came to NIH with experience in leading or collaborating on cohort studies and clinical trials. Dr. Gillman received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard College, earned a medical degree from Duke University, completed a med/peds residency at North Carolina Memorial Hospital, and received a master’s degree in epidemiology from Harvard School of Public Health.

Derk Joester, PhD
Northwestern University

Derk Joester is originally from Munich, Bavaria (Germany), and studied Chemistry at the University of Tübingen. He first came to the United States on a Fulbright Scholarship to pursue studies in Chemistry and Biochemistry before completing his Diploma in Organic Chemistry at ETH Zürich in 1998. He received his Ph.D. in 2003 for research in organic and supramolecular chemistry carried out under Prof. François Diederich at ETH Zürich. That same year, he joined the Weizmann Institute of Science (Rehovot, Israel) as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Lia Addadi in the Department of Structural Biology, where he continued his research as a Minerva Fellow from 2005 to 2007.

Since joining Northwestern University in 2007, Prof. Joester’s research has focused on the structure, chemistry, and formation mechanisms of mineralized tissues. Using advanced structural and compositional mapping approaches, Prof. Joester's work enables quantitative and spatially resolved analysis of mineral chemistry, trace‑element distributions, and crystallographic parameters in mineralized tissues. His group contributed to the understanding of the structure and composition of murine and human enamel at the nano- and mesoscales. This work has shown how persistent metastable intergranular phases and compositional gradients influence enamel properties. These gradients occur both within individual enamel crystallites and at the rod and interrod level. Together, they govern mechanical behavior, dissolution, and transport processes in enamel.

Margaret R. Karagas, PhD
Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth

Margaret R. Karagas is the James W. Squires Professor and founding chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College and Director of their Center for Molecular Epidemiology. Her research encompasses interdisciplinary studies to understand the drivers of human health beginning early in life. Her collaborative studies examine a broad range of exposure biomarkers, including teeth, along with individual susceptibility, and biological response biomarkers to environmental agents. She serves as a MPI for a pregnancy and pediatric cohort site of the Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program. She received her PhD in epidemiology from the University of Washington.

Kimberly LeBlanc, PhD
Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, National Institute on Drug Abuse

Dr. LeBlanc is the Scientific Program Manager for the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) since 2018. She is also the lead of the NIH Brain Development Cohorts (NBDC) Biospecimen Access Program, which governs access to biospecimens collected from the ABCD Study and the HEALthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) Study. She is a behavioral neuroscientist who completed her postdoctoral training at the National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive and Kidney Diseases, and earned her PhD in Neuroscience from the University of California, Los Angeles, where her research focused on the impact of cocaine on habitual control and incentive sensitization in animal models of drug taking.

Andrew T. Marshall, PhD
Children's Hospital Los Angeles

Dr. Andrew T. Marshall is a Senior Data Scientist at Children's Hospital Los Angeles, where he (as part of the laboratory of Dr. Elizabeth Sowell) conducts research on environmental factors that may influence child development. Currently, his research focuses on the effects of lead exposure (and its corresponding risks) on early adolescent developmental outcomes (e.g., cortical structure, cognitive performance). Outside of the laboratory, Dr. Marshall can be found spending time with his wife and dog, cheering on the Seattle Mariners, and watching as many scary movies as he can.

Thomas G. O’Connor, PhD
University of Rochester

Thomas G. O’Connor is the Wynne Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry, Neuroscience, and Obstetrics & Gynecology, and Director of the Wynne Center for Family Research at the University of Rochester. Professor O’Connor’s research seeks to identify the mechanisms by which early positive and risk exposures, including those in the prenatal period, shape children’s long-term mental, behavioral, and physical health and development. A clinical psychologist by training, Professor O’Connor employs observational, longitudinal, clinical and randomized trial designs in his research, which has been funded by research councils in the UK, Canada and several institutes within the US NIH.

Mackie C. O'Hara, PhD
Ball State University

Mackie C O'Hara, PhD, is a biological anthropologist, focused on advancing the field of dental biology through groundbreaking research in dental development, digital dental imaging and analysis methods, and physiological stress responses encoded in teeth. She has always focused on enamel, stress, and how the two relate to human and primate evolution. Teeth provide significant insight into an individual’s development and lived experience. Using state-of-the-art approaches including micro-computed tomography (microCT), synchrotron x-ray tomography, and hard tissue histology, Dr. O'Hara examines how incremental structures preserved in teeth shape the diverse dental tissue phenotypes and the way stress is recorded in teeth. She has used multi-scale approaches to understand how stress, life history, and evolutionary pressures influence enamel development and morphology. Currently, Dr. O'Hara serves as an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Biology at Ball State University.

Marc G. Weisskopf, PhD, ScD
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Marc G. Weisskopf, Ph.D., Sc.D., is the Cecil K. and Philip Drinker Professor of Environmental Epidemiology and Physiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in the Departments of Environmental Health and Epidemiology and Director of the Harvard TH Chan NIEHS Center for Environmental Health. Dr. Weisskopf received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of California, San Francisco, and his Sc.D. in Epidemiology from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His work focuses on the influence of environmental exposures on brain health across the life course, including outcomes such as autism spectrum disorders, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, cognitive function and dementia, and psychiatric conditions.  Dr. Weisskopf also explores epidemiological methods issues to improve causal inference from observational environmental health studies.