Researchers

Georgia Charkoftaki received her pharmacy degree from the University of Athens, Greece, where she also earned a MSc in drug delivery and a PhD in biopharmaceutics-pharmacokinetics. In August 2013 she moved to UC Denver to start a postdoc in clinical and translational science, focusing on kidney related diseases. Charkoftaki studied the pharmacokinetics of cyclophosphamide in patients undergoing dialysis and how Vitamin D affects drug metabolism in the kidneys, among other projects. At Yale, she has focused on bile acids and their mechanisms, acting as neuromodulators in alcoholism and neurodevelopmental disorders, as well as studying the role of aldehyde dehydrogenases (ALDHs) in neurodevelopmental disorders. She is leveraging her expertise in mass spectrometry-based omics approaches including metabolomics, lipidomics, and utilizing tissue imaging mass spectrometry (IMS) with a special focus on MALDI.

Dr. Chen has a broad background in environmental genetics and molecular toxicology, with specific training and expertise in redox biology, oxidative stress related diseases, and transgenic mouse models of redox dysregulation. Her research over the past ten years utilizes unique animal models and applies the system biology approach integrating multi-omics data and histopathology to understand the mechanistic roles of redox homeostasis in disease conditions related to environmental and dietary exposures. How does redox-elicited modifications of the liver proteome tune cellular response to protect against alcohol-associated fatty liver disease?Does oxidative stress play a mutagenic role in emerging water contaminant 1,4-dioxane-induced liver cancerWhat is the functional crosstalk between antioxidants in the central nervous system as they relate to neuronal health and disease?What is the translational importance of these new knowledge in risk assessment, disease prevention and treatment?

Kei-Hoi Cheung, PhD has distinguished himself as a researcher and educator in the field of Biomedical Informatics with a growing national and international reputation. A particular strength is Dr. Cheung’s ability to forge strong, productive collaborations with a range of different bioscience researchers at Yale, in which his contributions include the development of complex databases and informatics tools that are critical for the research projects being performed. In the context of these collaborations, Dr. Cheung is simultaneously able to carry out his own informatics research on issues involved in robust interoperation and integration of databases and tools in the biosciences. In addition to giving talks and presentations at national and international meetings, he has published his own informatics research in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, as well as contributing to publications focused on his collaborators’ research. He has established a broad base of collaborations with faculty in different departments at Yale, including Genetics, Pathology, Computer Science, Biostatistics, Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, and Biology. He was Director of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Core of the NIDA Proteomics Center, focused on collaborative informatics support of neuroproteomics research at Yale. In addition to being a collaborator on numerous grants, Dr. Cheung has been PI on several federal grants (NIH and NSF). Dr. Cheung is also a core faculty member of Yale's Ph.D. Program in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. Dr. Cheung’ s research interests include the semantic web using the next generation of web technologies to integrate life science data and tools, and is co-editor of two books for Springer-Verlag titled: “Semantic Web: Revolutionizing Knowledge Discovery in the Life Sciences” and “Semantic e-Science”, respectively. Dr. Cheung also led the BioRDF task force (2008-2010) of the Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group that is an international community engaging in the creative use of Semantic Web in biomedicine. In addition, Dr. Cheung has recently embarked on natural language processing (NLP) projects in annotating, extracting and retrieving information from clinical text as part of the Veteran Administration (VA) electronic medical records. In summary, Dr. Cheung’s biomedical informatics expertise in database/semantic web research and NLP tool development, his national and international recognition as a researcher/educator, and his research contributions in these areas exemplify the attributes of a prominent researcher in biomedical informatics.

Caroline H. Johnson, PhD, is a Tenured Associate Professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Yale School of Public Health. She graduated from Imperial College London in 2009 with a PhD in Analytical Chemistry. Since then she has held postdoctoral and staff appointments at the National Cancer Institute and The Scripps Research Institute. Dr. Johnson's research uses mass spectrometry-based metabolomics to understand the role of metabolites in human health. Her primary research interest is to investigate the relationship between genetic and environmental influences (diet, hormones and microbiome) in colon cancer. She is also examining exposures during pregnancy.

Dr. Liew is an environmental and perinatal epidemiologist and a research methodologist. A core focus of his work is understanding how exposures that occur during critical and vulnerable periods of development may shape disease risks and influence health outcomes throughout our life span. Dr. Liew is leading numerous studies with funding from the NIH to evaluate whether fetal exposures to endocrine disrupting compounds and/or neurotoxicants could harm fetal brain development leading to neurological disorders or impaired neuropsychological function in childhood and young adulthood. He is also interested in methodological research, especially the development of novel study designs and analytical techniques that could help us better address biases in observational studies or research using “real-world” data.

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

Dr. Pollitt’s research explores the human exposome through characterisation of environmental and biological samples using analytical and mass spectrometry (MS) techniques. Her group has developed various mass spectrometry (ICP-MS, LC-MS and GC-MS) to measure exposure to complex mixtures of trace elements and organic compounds. She has applied these exposure assessment methods in numerous in epidemiological studies.  Visit our lab website: pollittlab.weebly.com

Haseena Rajeevan, PhD has extensive experience in working with genetic variation and clinical data and has contributed to the design, development, and implementation of publicly available genetic variation and medical informatics resources.

Dr. Sun is a Research Scientist in the Department of Biostatistics. She received her B.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Tsinghua University in 1991 and Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1998. Prior to her position at Yale School of Public Health, she was a Postdoctoral Associate and Associate Research Scientist in Chemical Engineering at Yale between 1998 and 2000. Dr. Sun has extensive experiences in environmental engineering focusing on modeling contaminant transport in heterogeneous porous media, and she developed a mathematical and computational approach for colloid surface interactions in Chemical Engineering. As a bioinformatician and biostatistician, Dr. Sun is experienced in statistical methods for transcriptome analysis using both gene expression microarray data and next generation sequencing data, regulatory network modeling, data integration methods, functional genomics, and genome wide association studies. Dr. Sun has developed a number of novel statistical methods for more efficient data integration for the purpose of inferring gene expression networks and disease gene identifications.

Joshua Warren is an associate professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the Yale School of Public Health. He received his Ph.D. in statistics from North Carolina State University in 2011. Dr. Warren’s research focuses on statistical methods in public health with an emphasis on environmental health problems. Much of his work involves introducing spatial and spatiotemporal models in the Bayesian setting to learn more about associations between environmental exposures, such as air pollution, and various health outcomes including preterm birth, low birth weight, and congenital anomalies. He also has interest in developing and applying spatiotemporal models in collaborative settings such as epidemiology, geography, nutrition, and glaucoma research. His theoretical and methodological interests include multiple topics in spatial/spatiotemporal modeling and Bayesian nonparameterics.