A researcher with broad experience on the cellular responses to environmental stressors has been named the new chair of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Yale School of Public Health.
Dr. Vasilis Vasiliou, Ph.D., professor at the University of Colorado School of Pharmacy and of Ophthalmology at the School of Medicine, is expected to begin his duties at Yale in July. He will succeed Dr. Brian Leaderer, Susan Dwight Bliss Professor of Epidemiology (Environmental Health), professor of Forestry and Environmental Studies and deputy dean, who assumed the role of interim chair last August. Dr. Tongzhang Zheng, the Susan Dwight Bliss Professor of Epidemiology (Environmental Health), who had led the Department since 2002, stepped down to pursue his research and teaching full time.
“He has an impressive track record of building interdisciplinary, collaborative programs that take advantage of different scientific disciplines and perspectives. Drs. Zheng and Leaderer have done an impressive job developing the department over the past decade, and Dr. Vasiliou is the ideal type of leader to build from that foundation one of the best environmental health science programs in the country,” said Dean Paul D. Cleary.
He noted that understanding the ways in which environment affects health is a critical component to a fuller understanding of the numerous determinants of health. “Dr. Vasiliou has an international reputation for his important studies of the ways in which cells mediate the impact of environmental factors such as air and water quality,” he said.
Vasiliou has published more than 140 papers and edited a book on alcohol and cancer. He has also trained more than 20 doctoral and post-doctoral students, many of whom now hold tenure-track positions at universities or key-positions in industry. He also serves as editor-in-chief of the journal Human Genomics and is on the editorial boards of several toxicology and visual sciences journals.
At Colorado, Vasiliou established an internationally recognized research program that has been continuously funded by NEI/NIH and NIAAA/NIH since 1997. His research interests are focused on the mechanisms of cellular responses to environmental stress, the role of aldehyde dehydrogenases and glutathione in metabolism and disease, and the evolution of gene families. Drug discovery represents a more recent area of active interest in his program, particularly in light of a role for ALDHs in cancer stem cells.
“I am pleased and honored to be the new chair of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences,” Vasiliou said. “I look forward to working with the faculty, staff and students of the department and of other YSPH departments. I will do my very best to establish the department as one of the leading EHS departments in the country in both research and education.”
As the new department chair at the School of Public Health, Vasiliou said that he has a range of goals. He wants to further develop areas of research focus on respiratory diseases, diabetes and obesity, cancer, eye disease, and alcohol-related diseases. He also hopes to increase and diversify the department’s funding. This will be accomplished, he said, by enhancing the competitiveness of department faculty members for federal funding through focused research initiatives and promotion of collaborative and translational research, and through the further utilization of multiple sources of funding, such as Centers, U01 cooperative agreements, academia-industry partnerships and foundations.
Additionally, Vasiliou wants to establish toxicology, genomics, epigenetics and metabolomics within the department by recruiting additional faculty.
“It is anticipated that these new faculty members will complement the existing areas of expertise in the department and foster interdisciplinary collaborations within YSPH and across Yale,” he said.
He also wants to establish a public outreach program that will inform and educate external stakeholders (including academic leaders, legislators and the general public) about the importance of environmental health issues and the impact of environmental factors on the public’s health and well being.