 |
|
NCSOT Annual Meeting Speaker Information Health, Climate Change, and Environmental Toxicology: Emerging Research Needs
Dr. Jennifer Runkle is a trained Environmental Epidemiologist who serves as a Senior Climate & Health Research Scientist at NC State’s North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies (NCICS) and the Cooperative Institute for Satellite Earth System Studies (CISESS) within the academic arm of NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, NC. She is a co-lead director of a new NOAA funded center, the Carolinas Collaborative on Climate, Health, and Equity (C3HE). Her research seeks to understand the ways in which climate change impacts human health, particularly for socially and economically vulnerable populations. She is focused on using science to rapidly understand how, when, and where public health interventions may best be leveraged to eliminate climate change and health inequality in historically marginalized communities. Respiratory Health Effects of Wildfire Smoke Dr. Meghan E. Rebuli is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and a member of both the Center for Environmental Medicine, Asthma and Lung Biology and the Curriculum in Toxicology & Environmental Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She earned her Bachelor of Science and Doctoral degrees from North Carolina State University and completed her postdoctoral training at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on investigating sex specific effects of air pollutants and new and emerging tobacco products on respiratory health. Specifically, she is interested in how the interaction of sex (genetic and hormonal) and inhaled toxicants can alter respiratory health at the individual level and population level. Dr. Rebuli investigates these questions using in vivo prospective and observational clinical studies and translational cell culture models. Estimating spatially varying health effects in app-based citizen science research
Shu Yang is Associate Professor of Statistics, Goodnight Early Career Innovator, and University Faculty Scholar at North Carolina State University. She received her PhD in Applied Mathematics and Statistics from Iowa State University and postdoctoral training at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her primary research interest is causal inference and data integration, particularly with applications to comparative effectiveness research in health studies. She also works extensively on methods for missing data and spatial statistics. She has been Principal Investigator for several US National Science Foundation and National Institute of Health research projects. NC DEQ Algal Bloom Response and Reporting Dashboard
Dan Wiltsie has been the Algal Bloom Response Coordinator for the North Carolina Division of Water Resources since 2020. He leads the effort on bloom response by coordinating with field staff on site investigations and by analyzing samples. He also maintains the DWR Algal Bloom Dashboard to ensure that citizens have the most current results available. Today he will be discussing what algae and blooms are, DWR’s bloom response procedure and reporting tool, and give some examples of recent bloom events in North Carolina. Toxins Associated with Fresh Water Harmful Algal Blooms and Their Mammalian Health Effects
Donna Hill received her BS and DVM from NC State University; she worked as a private practice veterinarian for two decades in small animal medicine, three years at EPA in neurophysiology and neurohistology before veterinary school and spent the past 11 years researching the mammalian health effects of cyanotoxins with an emphasis on cylindrospermopsin and microcystins. She is currently preparing a repeat dose study on a cyanobacterial neurotoxin that is being documented more frequently and associated with dog and wildlife deaths, anatoxin-a. |
|
Jennifer Runkle, MSPH, PhD 
Meghan E. Rebuli, PhD 
Shu Yang, PhD 
Dan Wiltsie, MS 
Donna Hill, DVM