Key Faculty
Melissa Troester, PhD, MPH, Center Director
troester@unc.edu
The Troester laboratory studies breast cancer and benign breast disease using genomic, molecular pathology, and epidemiologic approaches. Much of Dr. Troester’s research focus has been on understanding interactions between the environment and breast genomics. She is Co-Principal Investigator on the Carolina Breast Cancer Study (CBCS), a study of breast cancer epidemiology and biology focused on understanding breast cancer disparities and she is Co-Leader of the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center’s Cancer Epidemiology program. She has extensive experience working in consortia, including the African American Breast Cancer Epidemiology and Risk (AMBER) consortium, the Breast Cancer Association Consortium (BCAC), and the Cancer Genome Atlas project. In the TCGA, she led analyses of benign breast genomics. A common theme throughout her work is integrating genomic data and molecular biology with human studies of breast cancer etiology and progression.
Stephanie Engel, PhD, Deputy Director and Pilot Project Leader
stephanie.engel@unc.edu
Dr. Engel has led multiple national and international studies of maternal and child epi/genetic variability in relation to prematurity, growth restriction, preeclampsia and gestational hypertension. Her research is at the interface of innate and exogenous exposures during the prenatal and early childhood periods, and how they work together to influence the development of the child. She has ongoing projects in the area of maternal and fetal genetic, epigenetic, and metagenomic variation and pregnancy outcome, and the relationship of prenatal environmental exposures with childhood neurodevelopmental impairments such as ADHD. Many of the environmental exposures she studies are over-represented in minority and low income populations, which leads to the potential for unique susceptibilities in high risk communities.
Rebecca Fry, PhD, IAB Chair
rfry@email.unc.edu
Dr. Fry directs the UNC-supported Institute for Environmental Health Solutions, an institute focused on promoting engineering solutions to specific environmental health problems. With a particular focus on genomic and epigenomic perturbations, her labs uses toxicogenomic and systems biology approaches to identify key molecular pathways that associate environmental exposure with diseases. A current focus is prenatal exposure to various environmental contaminants including arsenic, cadmium, and perflourinated chemicals. In her role as CEHS Associate Director for Research Translation, Dr. Fry will serve on the Executive Committee and Internal Advisory Committee to help direct the center and support its translational theme. She will identify opportunities to align CEHS activities with Superfund Research center activities, and will strategically address inclusion of CEC activities in all CEHS functions. She will participate in the Environmental Science Working Group, organized by the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences (NC TraCS) Institute, a clinical research center that unites UNC scientists across many disciplines. She will assist with organizing research presentations at scientific retreats sponsored by the Center.
Kathleen Gray, PhD, MSPH, Director of the Community Engagement Core (CEC)
kmgray@email.unc.edu
Dr. Gray’s research focuses on environmental health literacy, science communication, and community/stakeholder engagement. In 2015, Dr. Gray was awarded the Office of the Provost Engaged Scholarship Award for Partnership. Within the UNC Institute for the Environment, she manages the Center for Public Engagement with Science, which enhances understanding of current environmental science and health research and its relevance to daily life. She has over 20 years’ experience conducting environmental health education with community audiences and assisting businesses and government agencies in making sustainable choices. Prior to joining UNC, she led a statewide assessment of NC’s recycling industry, advised over 300 businesses in expanding their use of environmentally responsible products and services, developed and evaluated educational materials for EPA’s voluntary environmental programs, and managed a community-focused environmental health internship program at Vanderbilt University.
Folami Ideraabdullah, PhD, Associate Director of Career Development
folmai@email.unc.edu
Dr. Ideraabdullah works with other IAC leaders to develop CEHS research teams. Dr. Ideraabdullah has formal training and extensive expertise in mouse genetics and developmental epigenetics. As an Associate Professor in the Genetics and Nutrition Departments, her research program integrates genetics, epigenetics, nutrition, and toxicology to investigate mechanisms of epigenetic perturbation during development that lead to persistent, chronic, and/or multi-generational diseases.
Facility Cores
Haibo Zhou, PhD, MS, Co-Director Molecular Analysis and Data Science (MADS) Core
zhou@bios.unc.edu
Dr. Zhou is well-known for his biostatistical research in environmental statistics, outcome-dependent sampling, survival analysis, measurement error problems and reproductive epidemiology. Dr. Zhou has served as PI on four NIH-funded R01 grants on statistical methodology research in outcome-dependent sampling design. He has had outstanding collaborative experiences with researchers at UNC, NIEHS and EPA on important health studies. His outcome-dependent sampling research is focused on developing innovative and cost-effective sampling designs that will enable investigators to collect more informative samples at a fixed budget.
Katherine Hoadley, PhD, Co-Director Molecular Analysis and Data Science (MADS) Core
Dr. Hoadley has primarily focused her research on understanding the biology of cancer through genomic approaches, in large part through her work as a member of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project. Dr. Hoadley will work with Cyrus Vaziri to co-lead the Environmental Cancer Prevention program, specifically seeking to translate basic research to human data, including public genomic data and UNC-specific genomic data. She will attend monthly one-hour internal advisory committee meetings and one annual CEHS symposium (as calendar permits).
Jessie Buckley, PhD, MPH, Co-Director of the Translational Research Support Core (TRSC)
jessie.buckley@email.unc.edu
Dr. Buckley is an epidemiologist focused on characterizing health effects of environmental toxicants. Major areas of her research include identifying sources of chemical exposures, estimating effects of exposure mixtures, and assessing environmental influences on children’s development including bone health and obesity.
adult cancers.
Hazel Nichols, PhD, Co-Director of the Translational Research Support Core (TRSC)
hbn@email.unc.edu
Dr. Nichols is focused on improving cancer care by providing sound epidemiologic evidence to guide personal and medical decision-making around cancer risk and survivorship. Her current studies investigate experiences and health outcomes after endometrial and adolescent and young
adult cancers.
Kun Lu, PhD, MS, Director of Biomarker Mass Spectrometry Facility (BMSF)- TRSC Subcore
kunlu@unc.edu
The overarching goal of Dr. Lu’s lab is to better understand health effects of environmental exposure and individual response by integrating the microbiome, exposome, omics profiling, and biomarker development. Dr. Lu’s lab is working on a number of important environmental chemicals ranging from heavy metals to pesticides, as well as others with significant public health concerns. The current emphasis is being placed on microbiome research and exposome mapping. Dr. Lu’s lab aims at answering how gut microbiome interacts with environmental exposure, how gut microbiome affects disease susceptibility, and how host factors crosstalk with microbiome to influence its response. Another focus of Dr. Lu’s lab is to map exposome for human disease, with the goals of characterizing all exposures over the lifespan via high-resolution mass spectrometry, understanding the health impact of the exposome, and designing strategies to reduce exposure-associated adverse effects.
Susan Sumner, PhD, Director of Metabolomics and Exposomics Laboratory (MEL)- TRSC subcore
susan_sumner@unc.edu
Dr. Sumner is working to make personalized medicine and precision nutrition a reality. Using state-of-the-art metabolomics and exposome technologies, Dr. Sumner’s team determines how molecules that are present in our tissues and biological fluids are associated with states of health and wellness. Through this approach, biomarkers are discovered that can lead to new diagnostics for the early detection and diagnosis of disease, to monitor treatment and intervention, and to inform the development of intervention strategies.
Patricia Basta, PhD, Director of Biospecimen Processing (BSP) Facility- TRSC subcore
patricia_basta@unc.edu
Biorepository science research, biomarker discovery, and genetic epidemiology are the three current themes of Dr. Basta’s research. In the past she has also focused on the effects of drugs of abuse and pesticides on neonatal development. Dr. Basta is available to lend advice and consultation on all aspects of biospecimen collection, processing, storage and biomarker analysis for large and small epidemiology studies.
Jana Phillips, BS, Director of Population Engagement Research Collaboration (PERC)- TRSC subcore
jlphilli@med.unc.edu
Jana has dedicated nearly 17 years to scientific and clinical research at UNC. Her scientific work includes the use of viral vectors for gene therapy applications in a variety of disease models, as well as optogenetics research that focused on delineating neural circuits involved in the manifestation of neuropsychiatric disorders such as addiction, maladaptive eating behaviors, and anxiety. Her extensive clinical work involved serving as a Clinical Research Coordinator at UNC Fertility for 10 years, as well as the Clinical Research Network Entity Site Lead at UNC CEDAS. Currently, Jana directs operations for the CEHS PERC subcore, overseeing multiple clinical research teams, in addition to managing and initiating various projects involved with studying the effects of environmental and toxin exposures on cancer prevalence through UNC Lineberger.
Administration
Michael Sanderson, MPH, Associate Director of Administration
michael_sanderson@unc.edu
Michael oversees and manages administrative and research activities, including promoting and fostering new CEHS research collaborations, supporting research and programmatic activities, and encouraging pilot project development. His interests center on the coordination and translation of research to practice – creating and maintaining high quality public health services and environments. Michael’s professional experience has included work with local and state agencies as well as in the non-profit sector. He has served on and led many state level advisory teams and work groups advancing the health and health care of North Carolinians.
Pamela Mathews, Business Officer
pmathews@unc.edu
Pamela is an experienced business officer for the Center, managing budget and proposal development, expenditure tracking, monthly account reconciliation, asset and facilities management, and other finance duties. She works closely with the Associate Director for Administration to implement and oversee Center-related expenditures and prepare reports for distribution to the Center’s leadership, pilot project awardees, core directors, and other partners. She coordinates travel and expenditures from the Administrative Core, CEC and the External Advisory Board members
Laura Dunn, MEd, Research Specialist
laura_dunn@med.unc.edu
Laura provides administrative and research support for the pursuits of the Center, including seminar planning, publications and grant support, and meeting coordination. Laura received her M.Ed. from UNCW, and is a certified professional medical biller. Her professional experience includes the management of an accreditation and licensing test center, administrative work for private psychiatry practice, and work with Duke Pediatrics.
Georgia Mudd, Research Program Assistant
gmudd@unc.edu
Georgia provides project coordination and administrative support across the CEHS leadership team. She tracks publications and grants associated with Center projects and assists investigators with data sharing and publication compliance. She assists with the coordination of seminars – including promotion and travel arrangements for guest speakers. She provides meeting support (logistics and minutes) for CEHS internal and external meetings. She also works with Core facilities to support core facility meetings, data transfer, material transfer agreements, and data use agreements. She works with the TRSC as needed to support LIMS and ensure compliance with data sharing plans for final datasets and publications.
Stakeholder Advisory Board
Stakeholder Advisory Board members include representatives from:
- Asthma Alliance of North Carolina
- Chatham County Public Health Department Environmental Health Division
- Cherokee Indian Hospital
- Durham Public Schools
- Environmental Defense Fund
- Green Level High School
- Greensboro Housing Coalition
- Museum of Life and Science
- North Carolina Child Care Health and Safety Resource Center
- North Carolina Division of Public Health Environmental Health Section
Advisory Committees
External Advisory Committee
The External Advisory Committee (EAC) consists of four renowned environmental health scientists with expertise in toxicology, mass spectrometry, systems biology, genomics, pulmonary and cardiovascular disease, developmental disease, cancer, epidemiology and outreach. The EAC members, individually and as a team, provide expert opinion in areas relevant to the Center’s research and outreach activities. Members of the EAC are also called upon on an ad hoc basis to review pilot projects and other programs, as appropriate to their areas of expertise.
