Epidemiology is the study of how often diseases occur in different groups of people and why; it serves as the quantitative foundation for public health interventions and is a critical science for evidence-based medicine.  The focus of the Division of Epidemiology, in the Department of Environmental Medicine, is to gain new understanding of the inter-relationship of genetic and environmental factors impacting on human health. To address these issues, the epidemiologic portfolio includes broad population-based studies, focusing on genetics and other biologic risk factors, and investigations of unique populations, focusing on specific environmental exposures, including air toxicants, heavy metals, benzene, formaldehyde, pesticides, asbestos, cigarette smoke, dietary and hormonal factors, and medications.  The studies also seek to identify subsets of persons who are at risk of disease by using biological markers of exposure, biological damage or susceptibility to disease.

The Division of Epidemiology, in the Department of Environmental Medicine, is led by Dr Richard B. Hayes who was appointed to this position in February, 2009 as well as to the position of associate director for population sciences of the NYU Cancer Institute.  Dr. Hayes’ research program focuses on genetic and environmental factors related to cancer risk.  He studies benzene and formaldehyde-associated cancer risks and has initiated studies on air pollution and cancer risk in collaboration with scientists at the Sterling Forest research facility.  He also carries out epidemiologic research on prostate and colon cancer.

Dr. George Friedman-Jimenez carries out research involving the application of epidemiology to clinical and public health outcomes, and directs the Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Preventive Medicine course at NYU School of Medicine. He is conducting exploratory studies of exposures to airborne toxicants and health symptoms among workers and clients in NYC nail salons and an epidemiologic study of respiratory outcomes and exposure to airborne toxicants at the World Trade Center, among the 70,000 members of the NYCDOHMH WTC Health Registry. He is also completing an epidemiologic study of Workplace Aggravation of Asthma Symptoms among asthma patients at Bellevue.  Dr. Friedman-Jimenez also has a research focus on evidence-based medicine.

Dr Michael Marmor directs the NYU Prevention Project, a multi-faceted program focused on the epidemiology and prevention of HIV-infection among individuals at high risk of HIV infection and serves as a member of the Division of Pulmonary and Acute Care Medicine, Department of Medicine, in which capacity he has been conducting studies of the health effects of exposure to World Trade Center dust, gas and fumes; and asthma in adults and children.  Dr. Marmor also directs the Clinical Core of the NIH-funded NYU Center for AIDS Research (CFAR), in which role he supervises the provision of services and himself provides services in biostatistics, biomathematics, bioinformatics, epidemiology, volunteer recruitment, and regulatory affairs to HIV/AIDS investigators throughout NYULMC.  Dr. Marmor teaches “Introduction to Environmental Epidemiology,” in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, which has led to collaborative projects on Alzheimer’s disease and injury epidemiology.

Dr. Anne Zeleniuch-Jacquotteis the PI of the NYU Women’s Health Study (WHS), a prospective cohort of over 14,000 healthy women who donated blood in 1985-91 and have been followed-up since to assess health outcomes such as cancer and cardiovascular disease. The study has been funded by the NCI since its inception and led to over 100 publications.  Recent work focuses on whether vitamin D protects against breast cancer.  Numerous spin-off studies have used the resources of the NYUWHS, including a NCI-funded study headed by Dr. Arslan and an American Cancer Society-funded study headed by Dr. Chen. 

Dr. Yu Chen studies the influence of risk factors related to systemic inflammation on cancer and cardiovascular disease.  Dr. Chen is carrying out a multidisciplinary case-control study of the association between periodontal disease and gastric precancerous lesions and is conducting a nested case-control study to investigate the association between the levels of taurine, a nutrient and popular ingredient in energy drinks, and the risk of CHD.  Dr. Chen is also a recipient of Outstanding New Environmental Scientist Award (ONES) to study the interactions between arsenic exposure from drinking water in Bangladesh and genetic susceptibility related to inflammation and oxidative stress in cardiovascular disease.

Dr. Jiyoung Ahn was hired May 1, 2009 and is developing a research program focused on genetic and molecular factors related to cancer risk and prognosis.  She carries out epidemiologic research on genetic and tissue based biomarkers in the vitamin D pathway in relation to risks of prostate and colon cancer.  Also, she is leading a genome wide association analysis of genetic variants predicting circulating vitamin D levels. 

Dr. George D. Thurston, investigates ambient air pollution and adverse human health effects, considering individual subjects and their responses to ambient pollution, as well as citywide and nationwide population health characteristics and their aggregate associations with air pollution. His studies have also included both healthy and asthmatic children at summer camps in the northeastern United States, as these children are often outdoors and active during summer air-pollution episodes. His studies of aggregate populations consider both human mortality, i.e., numbers of deaths per day by cause, and morbidity, e.g., numbers of hospital admissions per day for respiratory causes. He has found that air pollution produces consistent adverse health consequences across the various populations and locations, for example, on a high-ozone, air-pollution day, New York City hospital admissions for respiratory causes rise approximately 20% above otherwise expected figures. In the aftermath of 9/11, Dr. Thurston’s group monitored the air pollution levels at the NYU Downtown Hospital near Ground Zero until the fires were extinguished, and communicated this information at public forums held in Lower Manhattan.  He is Deputy Director of NYU's Particulate Matter (PM) Health Effects Center since 2002, and is a member of the U.S. EPA's Clean Air Science Advisory Committee (CASAC) on nitrogen and sulfur oxide air pollution.

Dr. Kazuhiko Ito is an expert in human health effects and exposure assessment of ambient air pollutants. His current research interests include: (1) the roles of particulate matter (PM) components on human heath effects; (2) source-oriented evaluation of PM health effects using the PM2.5 chemical speciation network data; (3) the exposure error associated with ambient air pollution monitoring network and its implication on observed health effects; and (4) identification of sensitive sub-populations to ambient air pollution. Dr. Ito is carrying out projects with the New York City Department of Health on air pollution and out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in collaboration with the New York City Fire Department and Long Island Jewish Medical Center.  Dr. Ito conducts a study to model the impacts of weather and air pollution on asthma in New York City in collaboration with NYCDOHMH.  Dr. Ito also leads a project to study the role of the chemical components of ambient fine particulate matter on the respiratory and cardiovascular morbidity and mortality in a nationwide database. 

Dr. Paolo Toniolo has a primary appointment in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology.  He leads an International Consortium on Pregnancy and Health (ICPH) involving multiple institutions and over 40 investigators from the US and Europe engaged in collaborative research on the relationship between pregnancy and risk of maternal breast and ovarian cancers.  He is currently studying the relationships between pregnancy hormones and risk of cancers of the breast and the ovary and is developing methods to characterize and validate a genomic signature of pregnancy and novel genomic markers for early detection of breast cancer.

Dr. Alan Arslan has a primary appointment in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology.  He is actively involved in International Consortium on Pregnancy and Health (ICPH), with  research interests on the role of inflammation in female cancer and in the development of novel biomarkers for early detection of cancer. He is developing biomarkers of inflammatory processes in relation to the risk of ovarian cancer in a nested case-control study based on two prospective cohorts at NYU School of Medicine and northern Sweden. He is also involved in several NIH-sponsored pooling projects on rare cancers.

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