To me, science unlocks the secrets of the universe and research provides the keys to open the locks. Fundamentally, the research I pursue reflects topics that inspire me, fascinate me, and hopefully make the world a better place. At its most basic level, my research intertwines and threads together four major scientific topics that most drive my scientific curiosity: environmental health, chromosomes, cancer and wildlife. My research weaves these topics together in unique and powerful ways that have led to some remarkable discoveries and a driving passion to discover the unknown and to help improve how we address and think about environmental health. At a broad level, my research interests focus on understanding, preventing, and reversing the impact of chemicals in the environment on health. At its innermost core, I focus my research through the prism of chromosomes, the sophisticated subcellular structures responsible for organizing, housing, and transmitting DNA. Alterations in chromosome structure or number cause catastrophic effects in cells, in organisms and potentially in populations. This central focus provides my research with immense flexibility to work on a wide spectrum of environmental stressors and diseases, to work across multiple research levels from molecular to cellular to tissue to organisms to populations and to work on a variety of solutions such as better detection, improved risk assessment and management, novel treatments and strategies for prevention. Thus, my research is very multi-faceted in its tools, approaches, and questions, but at the center is a constant thread of understanding the impacts of environmental stressors on chromosome stability. At its broadest level, I contextualize my research with a “One” Environmental Health perspective, which utilizes the concept that health encompasses an interconnected triad of human health, animal health and ecosystem health. We harmonize our innermost core focus on chromosomes with the broad perspective of this One Environmental Health triad to gain novel interconnected insights.

My human health work is primarily focused on cancer with the principal focus on lung cancer, though I have and will continue to work on other cancers as opportunities and needs arise. I focus on lung cancer because it is the number 1 cause of cancer death in the U.S., more lethal than cervical, pancreatic and prostate cancer combined. 5-year survival rates are below 20% and have not improved for decades. This lack of improvement is fueled by a widespread misperception that lung cancer is caused by smoking and simply solved by smoking cessation and this misperception has stigmatized those afflicted with the disease. In actuality, while tobacco does cause lung cancer, it is clear other agents are a major cause of the disease. For example, 1 in 5 women and 1 in 12 men diagnosed with lung cancer never smoked. Understanding how agents other than tobacco cause lung cancer is a critical need and is a key scientific question addressed by my research. Metals are a group of agents other than tobacco that are a major cause of human lung cancer, but the mechanisms for how they cause lung cancer are poorly understood. Because of the key importance of metal-induced chromosome instMy research has been recognized in a number of ways.  The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) ash supported me with grants for over 20 years and currently I am the recipient of its most prestigious individual investigator grant, the prestigious Revolutionizing Innovative, Visionary Environmental Health Research (RIVER) 8-year R35 grant. The Society of Toxicology (SOT), the world’s preeminent toxicology society, featured me as a thought leader in the field at its annual meeting and continually online with a short film that is now on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/8tYYQvehl2I?si=x0aE0Wt7Tpp49Xg_. Overall, my work has been featured in numerous articles in local, national and international press and social media sites including short documentaries with Alexandra Cousteau and Miles O’Brien. ability as a central mechanism linking metal exposure to lung cancer, my research focuses on metal-induced chromosome instability.