Leadership

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.

Dr. Deziel obtained a Master’s of Industrial Hygiene and Doctorate in Environmental Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her research is focused on applying statistical models, biomonitoring techniques, and environmental measurements to provide comprehensive and quantitative assessments of exposure to traditional and emerging environmental contaminants in population-based studies. Her research uses a combination of large, administrative datasets and detailed community-focused studies to advance understanding of environmental exposures to chemicals, particularly carcinogens and endocrine disruptors. This research also serves to illuminate exposure mechanisms underlying associations between environmental chemicals and disease, thereby informing more effective policies to reduce exposures and protect public health. Dr. Deziel's contributions have been directed at two main areas: (1) exposure and human health impacts of unconventional oil and gas development (“hydraulic fracturing”) and (2) residential exposure to chemicals in common consumer products (e.g., pesticides, flame retardants) and cancer risk (particularly thyroid cancer). In addition, she consider disproportionate burdens of exposures (“environmental justice”) and the combination of environmental and social stressors in the context of her work.

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.

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.

Jordan Peccia, PhD, and Thomas E. Golden Jr. Professor of Environmental Engineering, integrates biotechnology with engineering to address emerging environmental problems.In his laboratory, Peccia focuses his research on human exposure to microbes in buildings and genetic studies to enhance biofuel development, among other areas. Along with quantitative engineering-based fundamentals and tools, he and his team have developed an extensive molecular biology skill set that includes transcriptomics, metagenomics, and computational biology.A graduate of Montana State University-Bozeman, Peccia earned his Ph.D. in environmental engineering from the University of Colorado-Boulder. He conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before launching his academic career as an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Arizona State University. He joined the Yale faculty as an assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering in 2005. Prior to his current appointment, he served as a full professor of chemical and environmental engineering.Peccia’s industry experience includes positions as consulting engineer and research engineer. As a private consultant, he has advised the federal government and start-up companies on photosynthetic biofuel production and microbial exposures in buildings. He has also provided consultation to federal, state, and local governments on human exposure to, and health impacts associated with, the land application of sewage sludge.The Yale professor has published 79 peer-reviewed articles in professional journals. He serves as the associate editor of the Journal of Indoor Air. Peccia has been awarded grants from private foundations as well as federal agencies, including the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. He has delivered numerous invited lectures at universities nationwide and in China, Finland, and Israel, among other countries.Peccia has been honored with the Teaching Excellence Award from Arizona State University, the Ackerman Award for Teaching and Research from the Yale School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and the Graduate Mentor Award from the Yale Graduate School. He received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in 2004. In 2017, he was elected a member of the Connecticut Academy for Science and Engineering.Via Yale News, February 7, 2018

Peter is professor of biostatistics at YSPH and director of the Yale Center for Analytical Sciences (YCAS) and the Yale Data Coordinating Center. Dr. Peduzzi has nearly 40 years’ experience in the design, conduct and analysis of clinical trials with a particular focus on pragmatic trials. He is the PI of several data coordinating centers funded by NIH and PCORI. Before coming to Yale he was the Director of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Cooperative Studies Program Coordinating Center in West Haven, Connecticut, which conducts multi-center, multi-national clinical trials and epidemiologic studies. He still maintains an affiliation with this center. His primary research interests have focused on the efficient design and analysis of clinical trials, with a recent focus on clustered randomized trials.

Christian Tschudi is the John Rodman Paul Professor of Epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health and earned an A.B. in microbiology and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Basel in Switzerland. He currently co-directs an NIH-sponsored Global Infectious Disease Training Program (D43) in translational research training on leishmaniasis & emerging infectious diseases and is the co-director of the China Scholarship Council-Yale World Scholars Program in Public Health. Dr. Tschudi is an expert on neglected tropical diseases, as evidenced by editorial board and study section appointments and a Burroughs Wellcome Award. He is currently the organizer of the international conference on kinetoplastid molecular cell biology. Dr. Tschudi’s studies focus on the biology of trypanosomes the causative agents of devastating diseases in Africa and South America with special emphasis on one of the fundamental steps in the life of a pathogen, namely the acquisition of infectivity.

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.

Dr. Hongyu Zhao is the Ira V. Hiscock Professor of Biostatistics and Professor of Statistics and Data Science and Genetics. He received his B.S. in Probability and Statistics from Peking University in 1990 and Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1995. His research interests are the developments and applications of novel statistical methods to address scientific questions in genetics, molecular biology, drug developments, and precision medicine. Some of his recent projects include large scale genome wide studies to identify genetic variants underlying complex diseases, genetic risk prediction, single cell analysis, biological network modeling and analysis, disease biomarker identification, genome annotation, cancer genomics, microbiome analysis, image analysis, and wearable device data analysis. He has published over 700 articles in statistics, human genetics, bioinformatics, genomics, and proteomics, and edited three books on human genetics analysis and statistical genomics. He has trained over 110 doctoral and post-doctoral students, many of whom are holding tenured or tenure-track positions at major universities in the states and overseas. Dr. Zhao has served as an editor and/or associate editor of leading statistical and genetics journals, including as a Co-Editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association Theory and Methods and a co-Editor of Statistics in Biosciences. He was the recipient of the Mortimer Spiegelman Award for a top statistician in health statistics under the age of 40 awarded by the American Public Health Association and the Pao-Lu Hsu Award from the International Chinese Statistical Association. His research has also been recognized by the Evelyn Fix Memorial Medal and Citation by UC Berkeley, a Basil O'Connor Starter Scholar Award by the March of Dimes Foundation, election to the fellowship of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering.