Predoctoral Trainees
Tess Bloomquist
Tess Bloomquist started her doctoral training in 2021. Prior to joining the department as a doctoral student, Tess worked in Dr. Andrea Baccarelli’s lab at Columbia where her interest in Environmental Health Sciences took flight. Her research interests surround environmental epidemiology and biomarkers of human population studies. Tess is currently conducting work on how chemicals found in consumer products impact the health of mothers and children.
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Tanya Butt
Tanya entered the program in 2020 with a Bachelor’s degree in Neuroscience and Psychology and a Master’s degree in Public Health. She is working under the mentorship of Drs. Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou and Diane Re. Tanya’s research interests include characterizing the contribution of environmental exposures associated with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Recently, she has worked on an analysis of long-term air pollution exposure and ALS risk, using mandatory patient registries from Massachusetts and Denmark.
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Autumn Clemons
Autumn entered the program in September 2018 with a Master’s of Science in Epidemiology. She is working under Dr. Pam Factor-Litvak in the Department of Epidemiology. Her current research focuses on evaluating the impact of socio-environment (e.g., phthalate and psychosocial stress exposures) on adverse pregnancy outcomes in an ethnically diverse nulliparous pregnancy cohort in the United States.
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Lina Demis
Lina began her PhD in Epidemiology in 2022. She received her MPH from Mailman. Her interests lie in applying advanced epidemiologic methods to climate related caused and consequences of forced migration on maternal mental health and child neurodevelopment.
Jocelyn Dicent
Jocelyn entered the program 2021 with a BS in Chemistry from Yale University. At Yale, her research primarily focused on organic synthesis. She also spent time doing bioengineering research using C. elegans and microfluidic devices. After graduating, she worked at NYU for half a year in Dr. Kurunthachalam Kannan’s lab. She focused on analyzing concentrations of metabolite organophosphate esters (mOPEs) in urine using mass spectroscopy. Her current research interests include neurotoxicology, biomonitoring, and using animal models to explore the outcomes of toxins or toxicants on health.
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Emma Gorin
Emma Gorin began her PhD in the EHS Climate and Health program in the fall of 2020. She was supported by the T32 training grant during the 2020-2021 academic year. Emma received an MSPH in Global Disease Epidemiology and Control from Johns Hopkins University in 2019, where her research included investigating sanitation availability in northern India and mobility among female sex workers in Guinea-Bissau. She also spent a semester in Cameroon working on implementation research and programming for key populations at risk for HIV. Prior to starting her master’s program, she worked in health education, clinical research, and international non-profit settings. Emma’s current research interests include infectious disease dynamics, emerging infections, antimicrobial resistant pathogens, and SARS-CoV-2.
Catherine Lucey
Catherine began her PhD in the fall of 2021. She graduated in 2019 from Vassar College with a B.A. in Biochemistry and, after graduation, worked as a next-generation sequencing technician in the lab of Dr. Junhyong Kim at the University of Pennsylvania. Catherine is interested how a mechanistic understanding of adverse health effects can inform large-scale environmental risk assessment and hopes to focus on reproductive and developmental endpoints. Her recent work with Dr. Brandon Pearson involved developing methods to isolate individual blastomeres from 8-cell stage mouse embryos. With Dr. Kathrin Schilling she will be working with arsenic and selenium metallomics.
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Kevin Patterson
Kevin Patterson entered the program with an MPH in Environmental Health Sciences, a certificate in Molecular Epidemiology from Columbia Mailman, and a BA in Native American Studies and Global Health from Dartmouth College. He is a trainee with the Columbia Northern Plains-SRP and has worked under the mentorship of Drs. Ana Navas-Acien and Anne Nigra during his MPH and as a research assistant before his fall 2022 enrollment. His research interests include investigating relationships between heavy metal exposure through drinking water and related cardiometabolic and kidney outcomes. Some of his projects have assessed differential uranium exposure in the Strong Heart Study and hypertension outcomes. With Dr. Ami Zota, he is investigating the impact of US federal housing assistance programs on phthalate exposures, and with Dr. Anne Nigra he is evaluating the relationship between sociodemographic characteristics at the water system level and arsenic MCL regulation.
Brittany Shea
Brittany started her PhD in Fall 2021. Previously, she was the Project Director for the Global Consortium on Climate and Health Education (GCCHE), based at the Mailman School. Brittany has worked to advance research on environmental health and climate change in other roles at the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health, Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies in Santiago, Chile, and Harvard Business School. Brittany has presented internationally on climate-health education and environmental health topics. She received a master’s degree from Harvard University and bachelor’s degree from Boston University. As a PhD student, she is interested in conducting research on the health impacts of climate change, climate-health mitigation and adaptation strategies, and environmental justice.
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Raenita Spriggs
Raenita Spriggs entered the program in with a BA in public health from UC Berkeley and an MPH from UCLA. Her research explores the impacts of climate-related exposures on communities historically burdened by environmental injustice. Since the fall semester, she has been completing a research rotation under the mentorship of Dr. Annie Nigra where she is pooling relevant data sources and characterizing multiple environmental exposures impacting incarcerated populations across the United States and territories (i.e., air pollution, drinking water quality, extreme heat, wildfires, and power outages).
