Carly Hyland, MS, PhD

Dr. Hyland is an Assistant Professor of Cooperative Extension with UC Agriculture and Natural Resources and faculty in the division of Environmental Health Sciences (EHS) in the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley. Originally from Wisconsin, Carly moved to Berkeley where she completed an MS in Global Health and the Environment (GHE) and PhD in EHS. Her graduate work examined associations of prenatal pesticide exposure with neurodevelopmental outcomes in the CHAMACOS birth cohort study. Carly did a postdoc at Boise State University from 2021-2023 where she led mixed-methods research examining pesticide exposure and risk perceptions between men and women farmworkers, and returned to Berkeley in 2023 as a Cooperative Extension specialist focused on climate resiliency among agricultural workers. She is currently leading and collaborating on mixed-methods projects examining farmworkers' experiences working during wildfires and gaps in protection, pesticide exposure among pregnant farmworkers, and interventions to decrease occupational heat stress. Carly helped found the ISCHE R2A Fellowship and is excited to keep learning about moving from research to policy and action, while also sharing what she’s learned with the incredible R2A Fellows and Mentors. In her free time, Carly competes in triathlons, loves hiking with her dog Rocco, and recently got into the sourdough game with her husband Brad.  

Cecilia S. Alcala, PhD MPH

Dr. Alcala is an Environmental Epidemiologist and Instructor/ Postdoctoral Fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology at the Agnes Scott College and a Masters in Public Health degree in Environmental and Occupational Health at the Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health. Her time as an Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health Environmental Health Fellow at the U.S EPA fueled her desire for knowledge about environmental exposures, their impact on child health and how environmental health literacy influences exposure risk. She continued her education as a doctoral student at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and was awarded the UJMT Fogarty Global Health Fellowship. As a Fellow, she completed the first baseline assessment of pesticide exposure among pregnant women and environmental literacy assessment pertaining to pesticides in Suriname. At Mount Sinai, her research focuses on how chemical and non- chemical stressors affects respiratory disease in children, and the creation and assessment of environmental health literacy to develop effective translation strategies to improve children’s health.

Elizabeth Kamai, MSPH, PhD

Dr. Kamai is an environmental epidemiologist and Research Scientist in the Environmental Justice Research Lab within the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. She manages community engagement and research translation in the Southern California Environmental Health Sciences Center (SCEHSC), the Maternal And Developmental Risks from Environmental and Social stressors (MADRES) Center for Environmental Health Disparities, and the Southern California Center for Children's Environmental Health Research Translation (SC-CEHRT). Dr. Kamai’s work focuses on understanding how exposure to environmental toxics affects the health of pregnant individuals, children, and residents of environmental justice communities. She collaborates across multidisciplinary teams to support community-led participatory science, analyze and visualize data, and translate research into actionable resources across communities in Southern California. Her projects include evaluating neighborhood health impacts of industries that emit toxic metals, characterizing sources and levels of air pollution in environmental justice communities, analyzing how living near urban oil and gas production affects pregnancy health, and assessing effects of particulate matter children's health in rural California. 

Kam Sripada, PhD

Kam Sripada PhD is a neuroscientist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. Her work together with international partners aims to protect children from environmental risks, promote healthy brain development, and reduce global health inequalities. She has studied interventions to reduce toxic exposures in low- and middle-income countries and emerging toxicant mixtures such as PFAS, microplastics, and nanomaterials. As a Research Fellow at UNICEF, she spearheaded the creation of the Healthy Environments for Healthy Children global programme framework. She communicates environmental health research for families through Little Things Matter (@littlethingsmtr, LittleThings.org).

Katarzyna Kordas, PhD

Kasia Kordas is an environmental epidemiologist with interdisciplinary training, research, and leadership experience combining global health, nutritional sciences, environmental health, and human development. Kasia earned her PhD in international health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Currently, she is an associate professor in the department of Epidemiology of Environmental Health at the University at Buffalo.

With her colleagues, Kasia established and co-leads the Salud Ambiental Montevideo (SAM) environmental school cohort in Uruguay. Her research program investigates the effects of complex environmental (chemical) exposures and toxicant-diet interactions on the health and development of urban children. Her research spans from molecules to neighborhoods, accounting for the family, school, and neighborhood contexts in the relationship between toxicants and neurobehavioral development of children. This program of research has been supported by several grants from the National Institutes of Health in the US, including current funding on complex mixtures, oxidative stress, and cognition. Kasia has mentored or co-mentored 20 MS and PhD students. Her publication record includes over 100 peer-reviewed articles in environmental health, pediatrics, and nutrition-related journals.

In the fall 2023 she was based in the Czech Republic at the RECETOX, Masaryk University as part of her Distinguished Fulbright Scholar award.

Martha María (Mara) Téllez Rojo

Mara Téllez-Rojo, is an epidemiologist, with a Masters in Statistics. She is a full professor at the National Institute of Public Health, Mexico with more than 340 papers published in high impact scientific journals; she has mentored more than 45 graduated students. She studies the long-term effects of the co-exposure of environmental toxicants, social stressors and nutritional conditions during gestation and infancy.  From 2004-2014, she headed the Statistical Division at INSP when she leaded a group for designing, conducting, and analyzing the impact of social interventions, and national surveys on health-related topics. Much of Dr. Téllez-Rojo’s recent work is focus on impacting health policy of lead exposure in Mexico.

Since 2002, she has been the principal investigator in Mexico for ELEMENT (Early Live Exposure in Mexico to Environmental Toxicants project) an ongoing birth cohort that began in 1994 which focuses on the developmental effects of environmental exposures on the life course. Along with Drs. Robert, Dr. Téllez-Rojo is Co-Principal Investigator for PROGRESS (Program Research in Obesity, Growth, Environment and Social Stressors) an ongoing birth cohort study since 2007.

In the last 10 years, along with Drs. Roberts (anthropologist) and Sánchez (statistician) she has worked extensively to develop a bioethnographic approach to ask and answer biosocial questions in both cohorts.

Michelle Del Rio

Dr. Michelle Del Rio is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at Indiana University’s School of Public Health in Bloomington. She is an interdisciplinary environmental health scientist and conducts community-engaged research to understand how environmental contaminants interact with determinants of health, and how these interactions can inform multilevel interventions. She is the first of her family to attend college and earn a terminal degree. Del Rio completed all her academic training in her hometown and at the University of Texas at El Paso. She also completed a one-year postdoctoral fellowship in her current department before becoming faculty in 2022.

With approximately 10 years of community-engaged research experience, Del Rio has contributed to reducing water insecurity, transportation gaps, and arsenic and lead (Pb) exposure for underserved and socially vulnerable populations. Del Rio uses mixed-method approaches and citizen science to characterize a person’s exposome and cumulative impacts from environmental exposures. Del Rio’s long-term goal is to develop a holistic intervention to mitigate children’s exposure to Pb and other environmental contaminants. In her free time, she leads initiatives to advance the training of children’s environmental health specialists, and enjoys time with her husband, Arturo, and two dogs.

Paulina Farias Serra

I’m a Mexican medical doctor with a master's in Environmental Health and a doctorate in Epidemiology who is passionate about translational research. As a full-time researcher and faculty member at Mexico’s National Institute of Public Health (INSP) in the Environmental Health Department, I act as the chemical substances representative for our Panamerican Health Organization (PAHO) collaborative center. Also, I am the Population Health Research Center’s spokesperson before INSP’s Research Committee. For 25 years, I have collaborated with national and international multidisciplinary teams in epidemiological research and health risk assessment projects on priority chemicals and their association with different health outcomes, focusing on vulnerable populations in several states of Mexico and in South Africa. I have coauthored Mexico’s new official norm for lead in air and the official National Guide for the Clinical Management of Lead Poisoning, and the guidelines for Mexico’s planned epidemiological surveillance system for blood lead levels. I am a member of: Mexico’s National Researchers’ System (SNI), a governmental agency that certifies its members’ credentials and work; Mundo Químico (Chemical World), a consortium that provides technical guidance on the integrated management of chemicals; and the International Society for Children’s Health and the Environment’s (ISCHE) board.

Ruth Etzel

Ruth Etzel is a specialist in pediatrics, preventive medicine, and public health.  She received her PhD in epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  She performed the first study to document that children with secondhand exposure to tobacco smoke had measurable exposure to nicotine.  Her pioneering work led to nationwide efforts to reduce indoor exposure to tobacco, including the ban on smoking in US airliners.  She also produced the first research to show that exposure to toxigenic molds in the home was associated with near-fatal lung bleeding in infants.  From 2009 – 2012 she led the World Health Organization’s activities to protect children from environmental hazards. The U.S. EPA honored Dr. Etzel with the Children’s Environmental Health Champion Award for outstanding leadership in protecting children from environmental health risks. She also received the Distinguished Service Medal from the U.S. Public Health Service, the Don C. Mackel Memorial Award from the CDC, and the prestigious Arthur S. Flemming Award.  She is a courageous leader in bringing environmental health risks to public attention and working collaboratively towards solutions.  For her persistence in speaking truth to power, she is known as an “inconvenient” pediatrician.