PROTECT Researchers Awarded During ISEE 2024
During the last week of August, PROTECT researchers, trainees, and staff from across projects and cores participated in the 36th Annual Conference of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE) in Santiago, Chile. The event, held from August 26th-28th and organized by ISEE, gave researchers from around the world the opportunity to discuss the current health, environmental justice, and epidemiological challenges facing the scientific community.
Project 1 and University of Michigan PhD candidates Jarrod Eaton, Seonyoung (Shannon) Park, Savannah Sturla, and Ram Siwakoti (pictured below, left to right) spoke about their research across several oral presentations. On the first day, Jarrod spoke about his research into associations between urinary PAH biomarker concentrations and birth outcomes. Shannon also spoke about her work looking at PAHs, but with a focus on their association with thyroid hormone concentrations during pregnancy. The next day, Savannah presented her research on prenatal exposure to metals and metalloids and child neurodevelopment outcomes in the PROTECT cohort. Ram later spoke about results from the LIFECODES study focused on PFAS and oxidative stress.
Jarrod Eaton
Seonyoung (Shannon) Park
Savannah Sturla
Ram Siwakoti
Community Engagement Core (CEC) members were also very active in oral presentations. University of Puerto Rico trainee Irene Lafarga took part in the ‘Socioeconomic Influences and Emergency Responses in Maternal Health’ session, during which she discussed research into birth experiences and mental health following COVID-19 in Puerto Rico. She was joined in that session by CEC Leader Carmen Vélez Vega, who spoke about some of the maternal health challenges present during emergencies in Puerto Rico. Report Back Coordinator Nobel Hernández Otero highlighted the CEC’s Report Back work by talking about how PROTECT returns chemical exposure results to participants and involves clinicians to improve outcomes. Communications Coordinator Chrystal Galán Rivera presented during Tuesday’s final oral session and spoke about promoting environmental health literacy with culturally relevant materials.
Several researchers also presented posters during the event, including Human Subjects and Sampling Core Data Coordinator Ishwara Ayala Ortiz, whose poster focused on maternal depression and children’s social-emotional development within the CRECE cohort. She was joined in the poster session by CEC researcher Krisyalie Morales, who presented a poster looking at the satisfaction of women in Puerto Rico with regards to Cesarean birth experiences. CEC Community Coordinator Héctor Torres Zayas participated in the virtual aspect of ISEE with a poster looking at the role of paternal occupational data in the PROTECT cohort.
Ishwara Ayala Ortiz
Krisyalie Morales
Héctor Torres Zayas
PROTECT researchers were able to support each other’s work throughout the conference by attending several oral and poster sessions. They were also able to celebrate at the end of the event when the paper ‘Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Phthalate Exposure and Preterm Birth: A Pooled Study of Sixteen U.S. Cohorts’ was awarded the Best Environmental Epidemiology Paper of 2023 by ISEE. This study looked at data from more than 6,000 pregnancies in the U.S., which included the PROTECT cohort, to see how phthalate exposure during pregnancy may contribute to some of the racial and ethnic disparities in preterm birth outcomes. In addition to including the PROTECT cohort, the paper, which was led by University of Nevada’s Barrett Welch, included PROTECT researchers Akram Alshawabkeh, José Cordero, John Meeker, and Deb Watkins as co-authors.
PROTECT researchers and trainees at ISEE 2024
Congratulations to those who were awarded for their research and to everyone who presented and represented PROTECT during the conference! And a big thank you to the ISEE 2024 organizers for all their work to put together such an enriching event!