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Administrators

  • Director

    • Department Chair and Susan Dwight Bliss Professor of Epidemiology (Environmental Health Sciences) and of Ophthalmology and Visual Science and of Environment; Director, Yale Superfund Research Center; Affiliated Faculty, Yale Cancer Center; Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health; Co-Director, Environmental Health Sciences Track, Executive MPH

      Research Interests
      • Alcoholism
      • Aldehyde Dehydrogenase
      • Diabetes Mellitus
      • Environmental Health
      • Glutathione
      • Gout
      • Ophthalmology
      • Mass Spectrometry
      • Genomics
      Vasilis Vasiliou, is Professor and Chair of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences. He received his BSc in Chemistry (1983) and PhD in Biochemical Pharmacology (1988) from the University of Ioannina, Greece. He then trained in gene-environment interactions, molecular toxicology and pharmacogenetics at the Department of Environmental Health in the College of Medicine at the University of Cincinnati (1991-1995). In 1996, he joined the faculty of the University of Colorado School of Pharmacy where he rose through the ranks to become Professor and Director of the Toxicology Graduate Program. Since 2008, he was also Professor of Ophthalmology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. In July 2014, he joined the faculty of Yale University in his new position. Professor Vasiliou has established an internationally-recognized research program that has been continuously funded by NEI/NIH and NIAAA/NIH since 1997, and recently NIEHS. His research interests include the etiology and molecular mechanisms of environmentally-induced human disease, such as liver disease, obesity & diabetes, cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases. His research focuses on the means by which the exposome (total exposures throughout life), metabolism (specifically aldehyde dehydrogenases and cytochrome P-450s) and antioxidants (glutathione and catalase) contribute to human health and disease. His laboratory utilizes state-of-the-art integrated system approaches that include metabolomics, lipidomics, exposomics, tissue imaging mass spectrometry, deep-learning, as well as human cohorts and genetically-engineered mouse models in order to elucidate mechanisms, and to discover biomarkers and novel interventions for human disease. Dr Vasiliou is the director of the NIEHS-funded P42 Yale Superfund Research Center and also the director of the NIAAA-funded R24-Resource Center for Mouse Models and Metabolomics Tools to Investigate Alcohol Metabolism and Tissue Injury. Dr. Vasiliou has published over 250 papers and edited three books on Alcohol and Cancer. Dr. Vasiliou is the editor of Human Genomics and serves on the editorial boards of several toxicology and visual sciences journals. Professor Vasiliou is committed to training the next generation of scientists. At the University of Colorado, he was the Director of the Environmental and Molecular Toxicology Graduate Program for 15 years. At Yale he leads an NIAAA-funded T32 Translational Alcohol Research Program (TARP) Training Program for post-doctoral fellows, and an NIHES -funded R25 Summer Research Experience in Environmental Health (SREEH) Training Program that introduce undergraduate students in Connecticut (CT) to Environmental Health Research. Dr. Vasiliou has trained mentored and advised more than 60 trainees ranging from MPH and PhD students to postdoctoral fellows and junior faculties.
  • Deputy Directors

    • Henry P. Becton Sr. Professor of Engineering; Professor, Environmental Health Sciences

      Jaehong Kim is currently Professor and Chair of Chemical and Environmental Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Yale University. Prior to joining Yale University in 2013, he was the Georgia Power Distinguished Professor and the Associate Chair for Undergraduate Programs at the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received B.S. and M.S. degrees in Chemical and Biological Engineering from Seoul National University in Korea in 1995 and 1997, respectively, and a Ph.D. degree in Environmental Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2002. He is interested in diverse aspects of environmental science and engineering, from fundamental photocatalytic and photoluminescent materials chemistry to water quality engineering in the developing world.
    • Susan Dwight Bliss Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology (Environmental Health Sciences); Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health; Senior Research Scientist, Yale Center for Perinatal, Pediatric and Environmental Epidemiology, Environmental Health Sciences

      Research Interests
      • Epidemiology
      • Environment and Public Health
      • Environmental Exposure
      • Environmental Health
      • Environmental Pollution
      • Asthma
      • Air Pollution
      • Air Pollution, Indoor
      • Public Health
      Dr. Brian Leaderer is the Susan Dwight Bliss Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Yale School of Public Health and Professor Emeritus of the Yale School of the Environment. He is also a Senior Research Scientist at the Yale Center for Perinatal, Pediatric and Environmental Epidemiology (the Yale CPPEE, or the "Center"), which he co-directed for 18 years.  In his role as the Deputy Dean at the Yale School of Public Health for over 14 years (during which he was also Interim Dean for 2 years), he oversaw Faculty Affairs including the Appointments and Promotion Committee and Faculty Mentoring Program. He has served on several Committees and Review Panels (NRC, EPA, HEI, etc.).  Dr. Leaderer's research interests, resulting in over 300 publications, are interdisciplinary in nature with a focus on assessing exposures (measured and modeled in both environmental chamber and field studies) to air contaminants (indoor and outdoor) and assessing the health impact resulting from those exposures in epidemiological studies. Over the past 30 years, he has been Principal Investigator on numerous research grants (totaling approximately $40 million). Several of these grants have been large epidemiologic-based grants (R01s) centered on the role of environmental and genetic factors on the respiratory health of children with particular attention to their role in the development of asthma and asthma severity.  He has collaborated with colleagues from several disciplines at the Yale CPPEE for over 30 years on several epidemiologic studies examining the impact of pollutants on perinatal and pediatric outcomes. With funding from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), he investigated the relationship between exposures to indoor levels of nitrogen dioxide, traffic contaminants, and the exacerbation of asthma in 1,401 children (in the STAR Study).  The findings from this study resulted in another NIH-funded (NIEHS) grant to conduct a double-blind, randomized control, triple cross-over design intervention trial in urban homes of asthmatic children to examine the efficacy of reducing exposure to indoor levels of PM2.5 and NO2 on reducing asthma severity.
  • Research Translation Coordinator

    • Professor of Epidemiology (Environmental Health Sciences) and Teresa and H. John Heinz III Professor in the Practice of Chemistry for the Environment; Co-Director, Environmental Health Sciences Track, Executive MPH

      Paul T. Anastas is the Teresa and H. John Heinz III Professor in the Practice of Chemistry for the Environment. He has appointments  in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Department of Chemistry, and Department of Chemical Engineering. In addition, Prof. Anastas serves as the Director of the Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering at Yale. Anastas took public service leave from Yale to serve as the Assistant Administrator for the US Environmental Protection Agency and the Agency Science Advisor from 2009-2012. From 2004 -2006, Paul Anastas served as Director of the ACS Green Chemistry Institute in Washington, D.C. He was previously the Assistant Director for the Environment in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy where he worked from 1999-2004. Trained as a synthetic organic chemist, Dr. Anastas received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University and worked as an industrial consultant. He is credited with establishing the field of green chemistry during his time working for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as the Chief of the Industrial Chemistry Branch and as the Director of the U.S. Green Chemistry Program. Dr. Anastas has published widely on topics of science through sustainability including eleven books, such as Benign by Design, Designing Safer Polymers, Green Engineering, and his seminal work with co-author John Warner, Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice.