Spring 2018 Seminar Schedule.

Join us every Friday from 12:45-1:45pm in BUSM L210 unless otherwise indicated below:

Detailed Schedule (To follow)

Epigenetic and Gene-Environment Interactions Impacting Environmental Health

EH Seminar Series – Spring 2018

January 19th:

Speakers: Julia Bauer and Stephanie Kim

Doctoral candidates, Department of Environmental Health, BUSPH

Seminar Title: Epigenetic and Gene-Environment Interactions Impacting Environmental Health; An Introduction

January 26th:

Speaker: Carmen Marsit, PhD, Professor, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University

Seminar Title: Epigenetic Mechanisms Linking the Environment to Human Health

Seminar Summary: This seminar will highlight the features of epigenetic regulation that make it a strong candidate as a mechanism linking environmental exposures to health. In particular, we will examine examples from studies of the developmental origins of health and disease which indicate a role of epigenetic regulation of the placenta contributing to newborn and early childhood health.

Speaker Bio: Carmen Marsit’s research, teaching, and service is focused broadly on understanding the molecular mechanisms responsible for mediating the impact of the environment in human disease, utilizing to inter- and multi-disciplinary research methods. His research program has focused on two distinct, yet highly related biologic processes: environmental carcinogenesis and human development. In those settings, he studies a variety of molecular alterations, with a growing interest on –omics technologies, which may be responsible, in a significant part, for cancer, adverse pregnancy outcomes, and common and rare conditions of childhood including obesity, growth, and behavioral disorders. He has significant expertise in environmental epigenomics, incorporating studies of the impact of the environment, including chemical, physical, and psychosocial factors, on the mechanisms controlling the fundamental cellular process of gene expression control, and how alterations or variation to these features impact health and disease. This research program fits at the interface of basic and population sciences, providing a sound scientific basis to studying a mechanism underlying the environmental contribution to health outcomes.

Recommended Readings:

· Placental Epigenetics in Children’s Environmental Health. Marsit CJ. Semin Reprod Med. 2016 Jan;34(1):36-41. doi: 10.1055/s-0035-1570028. Epub 2015 Dec 22. Review.

· Small-Magnitude Effect Sizes in Epigenetic End Points are Important in Children’s Environmental Health Studies: The Children’s Environmental Health and Disease Prevention Research Center’s Epigenetics Working Group. Breton CV, Marsit CJ, Faustman E, Nadeau K, Goodrich JM, Dolinoy DC, Herbstman J, Holland N, LaSalle JM, Schmidt R, Yousefi P, Perera F, Joubert BR, Wiemels J, Taylor M, Yang IV, Chen R, Hew KM, Freeland DM, Miller R, Murphy SK.

February 2nd:

Speakers: Erica Walker and Nishi Kuma

Erica Walker, Post-doctoral Research Associate, Department of Environmental Health, BUSPH

Seminar Title: Re-imagining Community Noise

Seminar Summary: This presentation will examine ways in which community noise has been traditionally described and offer new perspectives in measuring and visualizing sound levels utilized in epidemiological studies, regulatory policy, and for the community at large.

Nishi Kuma, Visiting Researcher, Department of Environmental Health, BUSPH

Seminar Title: Climate Resiliency & Social Determinants of Health

Seminar Summary: The social determinants of health – such as housing stability, racial discrimination, language and literacy, and social cohesion – will moderate or amplify the effects of climate change on health in urban populations, leaving some communities more vulnerable than others. As local governments develop policy to respond to climate change, recognizing and addressing the role of the social determinants of health will be a central challenge. This talk will explore how municipal policy-makers are building considerations of equity and social vulnerability into their climate change policy, highlighting examples of policy approaches in the US and Canada.

February 9th:

Speaker: Gina McCarthy

Professor of the Practice of Public Health, Director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Seminar Title: A Conversation with Gina McCarthy

Speaker Bio: Gina McCarthy is Professor of the Practice of Public Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and the Director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment. In this capacity, she leads the development of the School’s strategy in climate science, health, and sustainability. McCarthy has been a leading advocate for common sense strategies to protect public health and the environment for more than 30 years. As the Administrator of EPA under President Obama, she led initiatives that cut air pollution, protected water resources, reduced greenhouse gases and strengthened chemical safety to better protect more Americans, especially the most vulnerable, from negative health impacts. In 2015, McCarthy signed the Clean Power Plan, which set the first-ever national standards for reducing carbon emissions from existing power plants.

February 16th:

Speaker: Dr. Neel Aluru, PhD, MS

Aluru Laboratory, Biology Department, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Seminar Title: Environmental Exposures, Sensitive Windows of Development and Epigenetic Regulation

Seminar Summary: This seminar will focus on the effects of early life exposure to environmental chemicals on epigenetic mechanisms of action. In particular, I will discuss the results from zebrafish studies examining the effects of exposure to toxins and toxicants during sensitive windows of early development and pre-conception.

Speaker Bio: Neel Aluru is an Associate Scientist in the Biology Department at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where he works on the impact of toxins and toxicants on epigenetic mechanisms, particularly DNA methylation and non-coding RNAs. His work utilizes fish (zebrafish and Atlantic killifish) as a model system to address the long-term effects of developmental exposures to environmental chemicals. His research work is focused on characterizing the role of DNA methyltransferases in toxicant-induced alterations in DNA methylation. He is part of the Woods Hole Center for Oceans and Human Health and Boston University Superfund Research Program.

February 23rd:

Speaker: Mustafa Santiago Ali

Senior Vice President of Climate, Environmental Justice & Community Revitalization for the Hip Hop Caucus; former EPA Assistant Associate Administrator for Environmental Justice and Senior Advisor for Environmental Justice and Community Revitalization

Seminar Title: TBD

Seminar Summary: TBD

Speaker Bio:

Mustafa Ali joined the Hip Hop Caucus, after working 24 years at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. At the EPA, he served as the Assistant Associate Administrator for Environmental Justice and Senior Advisor for Environmental Justice and Community Revitalization. Mustafa elevated environmental justice issues and worked across federal agencies to strengthen environmental justice policies, programs and initiatives. At the EPA, Mustafa led the Interagency Working Group on Environmental Justice (EJIWG), which was comprised of 17 federal agencies and White House offices focused on implementing holistic strategies to address the issues facing vulnerable communities. Mustafa Ali worked for EPA Administrators beginning with William Riley and ending with Scott Pruitt. He joined the EPA as a student and became a founding member of the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice (OEJ). Mr. Ali also served as the Director of Communications in the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice (OEJ), where he led the Communications and Stakeholder Involvement (CSI) team. In 2012, Mustafa launched the EPA’s Environmental Justice in Action Blog, which reached over 100,000 followers. This blog highlighted innovative actions to address environmental justice, sustainability and climate change issues. In 2010, Mr. Ali also served as the Environmental Justice Lead for the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. In 2004, he was selected as the EPA’s National Enforcement Training Institutes “Trainer of the Year” for his efforts in training over 4,000 across the country in “The Fundamentals of Environmental Justice.”

Mustafa Ali was a Brookings Institution Congressional Fellow in the Office of Congressman John Conyers from 2007 through 2008. His portfolio as a Legislative Assistant focused on Foreign Policy in Africa and South America, Homeland Security, Health Care, Veterans Affairs, Appropriations and Environmental Justice.

Mustafa Ali has been a Guest Lecturer at Yale University, George Washington University, Georgetown University, Spelman College, Albany Law School and Howard University School of Law. Mustafa is a former instructor at West Virginia University and Stanford University in Washington, and the former co-host of the “Spirit in Action” radio show which focused on social justice issues.

March 23rd:

Speaker: L. Adrienne Cupples, PhD, Professor of Biostatistics and of Epidemiology, Boston University School of Public Health

Seminar Title: Gene by Environment Interaction: Study Designs, Analyses, Some Examples

Seminar Summary: It is known that genes affect disease and that environment/behavior affect disease, but much less is known how the two (genes and environment) jointly affect disease. In this talk, we will focus on how genes and environment interact in their relation to disease. We will discuss study designs, some aspects of analysis and will provide some examples from the Framingham Heart Study and the Genetic Investigation of Anthropomorphic Traits Consortium.

Speaker Bio: L. Adrienne Cupples, Ph.D. is Professor of Biostatistics and of Epidemiology. She has a long standing interest in statistical methods for epidemiologic studies, for survival data analysis and for genetic epidemiology. She has taught for thirty years at both the introductory and advanced levels. She developed several of the courses in the Biostatistics curriculum, including Statistical Methods for Epidemiology (BS852) and has received numerous teaching awards, including the Norman A Scotch Award for Excellence in Teaching at the School of Public Health. For her efforts in research she received the BUSPH Faculty Career Award in Research & Scholarship as the First Recipient. And she received the Janet L. Norwood Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Woman in the Statistical Sciences as the ninth recipient in 2010 and the 2012 L. Adrienne Cupples Award for Excellence in Teaching, Research and Service in Biostatistics. In 2014 she received the AHA Richard Remington Lecturer and in 2017 she received the International Genetic Epidemiology Society Leadership Award. She has collaborated in the Framingham Heart Study for more than 30 years on a variety of topics from risk factors for sudden death, nutritional epidemiology and most recently the genetic etiology of cardiovascular disease and its risk factors. She has served as Co-Principal Investigator of the NHLBI Contract to Boston University for the Framingham Heart Study and Co-Chair of the Framingham Genetics Steering Committee. She also has a long history with the study of the genetic etiology of Alzheimer’s disease in the MIRAGE Study (Multi-Institutional Research of Alzheimer’s Genetic Epidemiology) and of Huntington disease. She has been actively involved in genetic risk prediction and evaluation of how people interpret and respond to such predictions, particularly in the context of Alzheimer’s disease through the REVEAL (Risk Evaluation and Education for Alzheimer’s Disease) Study.

Recommended Readings:

1. http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/106/18/2315.long

Ordovas JM, Corella D, Demissie S, Cupples LA, Couture P, Coltell O, Wilson PW, Schaefer EJ, Tucker KL. Dietary fat intake determines the effect of a common polymorphism in the hepatic lipase gene promoter on high-density lipoprotein metabolism: evidence of a strong dose effect in this gene-nutrient interaction in the Framingham Study. Circulation. 2002 Oct 29;106(18):2315-21. PMID: 12403660

2. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14977

Justice AE, Winkler TW, Feitosa MF, Graff M, Fisher VA, Young K, Barata L, …, Loos RJF, Kilpeläinen TO, Liu CT, Borecki IB, North KE, Cupples LA. Genome-wide meta-analysis of 241,258 adults accounting for smoking behavior identifies novel loci for obesity traits. Nat Commun. 2017 Apr 26;8:14977. doi: 10.1038/ncomms14977. PMID: 28443625

March 30th:

Speaker: Karl Kelsey, MD, MOH, Professor, Epidemiology & Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Brown University

Seminar Title: Immunomethylomics: A Novel Approach to the Epidemiology of the Immune System

Seminar Summary: Lineage specific changes in DNA methylation are a defining component of the development of any tissue. We have taken advantage of this to discover ‘libraries’ of specific methylated loci that comprise a stable, leukocyte-specific template, demarcating individual cellular subtypes. We then use these data to deconvolute array-based blood methylation data, yielding population-level information on the relative leukocyte profile. This allows for epidemiologic interrogation of the environmental drivers of immune perturbations, something that has rarely been possible on any large scale.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Karl Kelsey, MD, MOH, is Professor of Community Health and Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Brown University. He is Director of the Center for Environmental Health and Technology and Head of the Environmental Health Section in the Departemnt of Epidemiology. Dr. Kelsey is interested in the application of laboratory-based biomarkers in environmental disease, with experience in chronic disease epidemiology and tumor biology. The goals of his work include a mechanistic understanding of individual susceptibility to exposure-related cancers. In addition, his laboratory is interested in tumor biology, investigating somatic alterations in tumor tissue from patients who have developed exposure-related cancers. This work involves using an epidemiologic approach to characterize epigenetic and genetic alteration of genes in the causal pathway for malignancy. Active work includes several studies of individual susceptibility to cancer. Dr. Kelsey’s laboratory is investigating susceptibility to smoking-related lung cancer, studying multi-racial and ethnic populations. In addition, the laboratory is also studying inherited susceptibility to brain tumors and pancreatic cancer. Major case control studies that are ongoing in the laboratory include studies designed to understand inherited and acquired susceptibility in head and neck cancers. The laboratory is also involved in a case control study of asbestos-associated mesothelioma, and arsenic exposure, cigarette smoking and bladder cancer. Considerable work is being devoted to understanding the mechanisms of action of both asbestos and arsenic including their ability to effect promoter methylation and gene silencing in carcinogenesis. Recent work in the laboratory includes an interest in using newly developed DNA methylation biomarkers to probe immune profiles from archived blood. Dr. Kelsey received his MD from the University of Minnesota and Masters of Occupational Health from Harvard University.

Recommended Readings:

· Epigenetic epidemiology as a tool to understand the role of immunity in chronic disease Nelson HH and Kelsey KT. Epigenomics. 2016 Aug;8(8):1007-9. . doi: 10.2217/epi-2016-0055. Epub 2016 Jul 13.

· DNA methylation arrays as surrogate measures of cell mixture distribution Houseman EA, Accomando WP, Koestler DC, Christensen BC, Marsit CJ, Nelson HH, Wiencke JK, Kelsey KT. BMC Bioinformatics. 2012 May 8;13:86. doi: 10.1186/1471-2105-13-86.

April 13th:

Speaker: Saurabh Chatterjee, PhD, Associate Professor of Environmental Health Sciences, University of South Carolina’s Arnold School of Public Health

Seminar Title: TOLLS TAKE A TOLL IN GULF WAR ILLNESS: Microbiome to MicroRNAs

Seminar Summary: The talk will feature the role of microbiome alterations-induced TLRs in gut leaching, TLR activation, targeting micro-RNAs and system pathophysiology. Briefly, the talk will describe the latest results from the Gulf War Illness pilot study where GW relevant chemicals have been found to alter the gut microbiome. The resultant alteration has led to activation of the TLR4 and TLR5 receptors in the intestine, liver and the brain. The mechanisms include gastrointestinal leaching, activation of TLRs 4 and 5 and induction of miRs 21, 155 and 34a, all inducible by the TLR4 pathway. Future research prospects about the role of the chemicals in hyper or hypomethylation of CPG islands will also be discussed.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Saurabh Chatterjjee is an Associate Professor of Environmental Health Sciences at the University of South Carolina’s Arnold School of Public Health. He is also the director of the environmental health & disease laboratory. The main objective of the Chatterjee lab is to perform cutting-edge biomedical research on the development of metabolic syndrome and chronic inflammatory liver diseases like nonalcoholic steatohepatitis in an underlying condition of obesity. The laboratory has special research emphasis on the effects of environmental toxins in affecting the above disease developments and pathogenesis.

Recommended Readings:

Dattaroy S et al 2015, Pourhoseini S et al 2014, Alhasson F et al, 2014. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0172914

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MORE DETAILED SPEAKER INFORMATION TO COME