Faculty Spotlight: Birgit Claus Henn.

Collaborative work is key to developing sustainable public health solutions and improving population health outcomes. This weekly series spotlights one SPH faculty member who advances public health through collaborations within the field and across sectors.

Can you describe your research on exposure to environmental toxicants and the impact on child development?  

I am an environmental epidemiologist and my work focuses on how toxicants in our everyday environment affect fetal and child development. In particular I am passionate about understanding how multiple environmental factors jointly contribute to changes in brain function. The complexity of the human brain, especially as it develops, is fascinating!

I became interested in environmental impacts on child development when I was pursuing my MPH at the University of California, Berkeley. There is of course a ton of agriculture in the state, and I was fortunate to be able to work on a project looking at Mexican migrant farmworkers who were unintentionally exposing their children to a mix of pesticides that came home on their clothing. This got me hooked on children’s environmental health and planted a seed in me about the need to understand how mixtures of environmental factors, as opposed to one factor at a time, impact brain development.

My work has since expanded to examine other classes of chemicals, including neurotoxic metals as well as endocrine disrupting chemicals such as phthalates and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). The potential for these compounds to interact in the human body to jointly impact health is enormous. The field of environmental health is just starting to explore in earnest the effects of “mixtures” on health outcomes. Most of my research time is spent on this now. I am very happy to be involved in projects around the world — estimating the impacts of multiple metals on cognition and behaviors in Italian adolescents living near ferroalloy industry and in children living in Mexico City; evaluating effects of numerous endocrine disrupting chemicals on the health of reproductive-age women in Detroit, MI; and examining exposure to a mixture of drinking water contaminants in a local MA community. It is very exciting to be able to investigate developmental effects of environmental exposures across a wide span of the life course.

How are collaborative partnerships integral to your work, and can you describe one or two collaborations that have been most meaningful to you?

Collaborations are key to everything I do! Environmental Health is, at its core, a multidisciplinary science, so EH folks are already wired to collaborate across disciplines. This makes projects really fun, because I get to hear and learn from many other areas of Public Health. My interest in quantifying effects of environmental mixtures has necessarily projected me neck-deep into biostatistics methods, so several of my collaborations have been with exceptional biostatisticians at Harvard and Icahn School of Medicine. I have also been very fortunate to collaborate on several larger cohorts around the world with researchers at Icahn School of Medicine, Instituto Nacional de Salud Pública in Mexico, and also here at BUSPH in the Epidemiology Department. I cannot say enough how grateful I am to my collaborators for all the energy they have exerted collecting high quality data! I have to also highlight my amazing doctoral students, who are extremely dedicated and hard working. In fact, all the EH doctoral students are integral to my own successes and those of the EH department. 

“Professor Claus Henn works on research projects with partners across multiple institutions, a testament to her strong analytical skills and her collaborative spirit. Her research emphases, including understanding the health effects of chemical mixtures and consequences for cognition in children, require working closely with biostatisticians, epidemiologists, neuropsychologists, and many others. She has learned the core methods across these disciplines and has established partnerships that amplify her considerable skills and expertise.”

Jonathan Levy, chair of the Department of Environmental Health and professor of environmental health