Virginia Rauh Makes an Impact Through Mentorship

Virginia Rauh came to the Columbia Mailman School in 1984, at time when there were fewer female professors than there are today, and fewer opportunities for formal mentorship. Early in her career, she won an NIH Career Development Award, also known as a K Award--grants that are given to promising young faculty to develop their research skills. This was an important step in starting an independent research career.

Years later, as a professor of population and family health in the Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health, Rauh continued to compete successfully for NIH grants. As vice chair for research in the Heilbrunn Department, she was asked to start a mentorship program for younger faculty to help them follow a successful trajectory. “We would share information about grant applications,” Rauh says, “how to deal with program officers, how to get feedback, how to deal with your study section, how to handle revisions and remarks to reviewers, and how to make decisions about funding opportunities.” Mentoring sessions over Zoom during the pandemic year of 2020 contributed to three assistant professors successfully obtaining K Awards in 2021. Those younger faculty members nominated Rauh for the Dean’s Excellence in Mentoring Award, which Dean Linda P. Fried awarded to Rauh in May.

“In addition to the superlatives she gets as a scientist, Virginia Rauh is also an exceptional mentor who has provided invaluable support to numerous faculty members in the Department of Population and Family Health and beyond,” says Dean Fried.

A Leader in Research

Rauh has a track record of other successes during her nearly 40 years at Columbia Mailman. An environmental epidemiologist with postdoctoral training in psychiatric epidemiology, she often looks at environmental stressors. (She was part of a team that examined how air pollution from the World Trade Center collapse affected pregnant women and their children.) In a series of impactful studies, Rauh examined the effects of the organophosphorus insecticide chlorpyrifos on neurodevelopment and brain abnormalities in children. She has published many papers in that area showing that prenatal exposure to the pesticide—present in household insecticides that were widely used by residents in low-income housing in the South Bronx, Harlem, and other city neighborhoods—was causing neurological problems in children.

Rauh’s research found that for every increased increment of prenatal chlorpyrifos exposure, a child’s IQ dropped by 1.4 percent. Similar results were found by other investigators among children of farmworkers in California whose mothers were exposed to the same class of pesticide, organophosphates, while pregnant and working in the fields. Rauh’s work resulted in a ban on organophosphate insecticides for household use in the early aughts. But it took almost 20 more years to get the EPA to ban them for agricultural use, as it did in 2022.

“To have the opportunity and experience of designing studies from the very beginning and see the scientific findings translate into changes in public health policy has been extremely gratifying,” Rauh says. She is still following the 660 children who made up the study cohort, who are now young adults, and she has included many colleagues in that work. For instance, when F. Dubois Bowman, PhD, a biostatistician, came to Columbia in 2014, he joined her in studies looking at the possibility of the cohort developing Parkinsonian–like symptoms from their prenatal exposure. “His team was doing some of the data analysis with the neuroimaging data,” Rauh says. “And he has continued this collaboration after assuming a new position as dean of the University of Michigan School of Public Health. It's such a privilege at this point in my career to have access to a network of collaborators from so many different disciplines.”

Convening, Teaching, Learning

Rauh sees team science as a uniquely rewarding and productive experience. “As a senior researcher, I enjoy pulling together interdisciplinary teams of researchers. Those relationships are an important part of having long-term collaborations being a mentor to more junior colleagues.” Early in her own career, Rauh had less access to the kind of formal mentoring that she now gives to early career investigators. But she did have at least one important role model when she first arrived at Columbia Mailman School: Zena Stein, an epidemiologist who came to Columbia from South Africa in the 1960s along with her husband Mervyn Susser. “She was a remarkable woman, very devoted to public health and human rights causes,” Rauh says.

Stein also demonstrated how to work collaboratively throughout her long career. She retired in 2003 but continued to write research articles with Susser, with her children who are public health researchers, and with others. Stein died in 2021. Rauh says that she looks to Stein’s example to inform different stages of her own career, as new methods and perspectives arise.“I think the value of mentorship is critical for early career academics,” she says, “but it is also incredibly rewarding for the mentor, who has the opportunity to be part of the journey for junior faculty as they develop their academic lives.”