Researchers

Dr. Oken is President of the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute and Chair of the Harvard Medical School Department of Population Medicine. She completed residency training in both internal medicine and pediatrics. Her research interests include the influence of nutrition during pregnancy and childhood on maternal and child health. She has studied the balance of risk and benefit from maternal fish consumption during pregnancy on child development. She has also performed a number of studies on the influence of modifiable behaviors during pregnancy, such as smoking, physical activity, and diet, on risk for chronic disease among both mothers and their children. Dr. Oken teaches clinical epidemiology and population health to Harvard Medical School students.

Andrea Baccarelli is the Dean of the Faculty at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. A distinguished scientist, Dr. Baccarelli investigates the molecular mechanisms by which a wide array of environmental exposures causes human disease. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine for his pioneering work showing that social and environmental risk factors adversely affect the human epigenome, thereby causing long-term health consequences. Beyond epigenomics, he has explored mechanisms including epitranscriptomics, extracellular vesicles, small non-coding RNAs, mitochondrial DNA, and the microbiome to understand the way toxins and other stressors affect genetic expression and overall health. Dr. Baccarelli’s work has been used by multiple agencies worldwide, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, to help shape pollution control policies.

Dr. Baccarelli previously served as the Leon Hess Professor and Chair of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health. He also directed the NIH/NIEHS P30 Center for Environmental Health and Justice in Northern Manhattan. He is former president of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology, and since 2021, he has served as president of the society’s North America Chapter.

Dr. Cardenas is an environmental epidemiologist and serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health at Stanford University. His research looks at early life exposures in utero and epigenetic alterations along with their potential role in the developmental origins of health and disease. His work on Project Viva focuses on investigating the role of environmental and nutritional exposures during pregnancy in molding the infant epigenome at birth. Particularly their relationship with DNA methylation as well as DNA hydroxymethylation and the persistence of these modification during childhood.

Dr. Gold's research focuses on the relationships between environmental exposures and the incidence or severity of respiratory diseases, including asthma. The environmental exposures considered include indoor allergens, including fungi, smoking, outdoor ozone and particles. She investigates the environmental exposures which may explain socioeconomic, cultural and gender differences which have been observed in asthma severity. These include perinatal exposures and family stress as well as exposure to the allergens and pollutants mentioned above. She is also interested in the cardiopulmonary effects of particles on the elderly.

Dr. Tamarra James-Todd is the Mark and Catherine Winkler Assistant Professor of Environmental Reproductive and Perinatal Epidemiology in the Departments of Environmental Health and Epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an Epidemiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. James-Todd’s evaluates the link between environmental chemical exposures and diabetes, obesity and related cardiovascular disease risk among women during the perinatal period and beyond. She is particularly interested in environmental endocrine disrupting chemical exposures, including exposures to phthalates, phenols, and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, during the sensitive window of pregnancy as it relates to long-term adverse cardiometabolic outcomes in women. She is also interested in racial/ethnic disparities in environmental exposures as it relates to both pregnancy and cardiovascular disease outcomes. Dr. James-Todd is the Principal Investigator of the NIEHS-funded ERGO study, an ongoing prospective cohort study exploring the role of environmental factors on pregnancy and postpartum health. Dr. James-Todd received her B.S. in molecular biology from Vanderbilt University; MPH in International Health from Boston University; and PhD in Epidemiology from Columbia University.

Dr. Perng is a nutritional epidemiologist focused on maternal and child health. Her interests fall under three lines of inquiry: (1) identifying early life determinants of childhood obesity and dysmetabolism; (2) elucidating biological pathways involved in development of adiposity; and (3) understanding how maternal condition during the peripartum period corresponds with postpartum cardiovascular and metabolic health. She is particularly interested in metabolomic profiles associated with excess adiposity and their role in development of metabolic risk.

Dr. Soria-Contreras is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She holds a BSc in Nutrition from the University of Guadalajara in Mexico, a MSc in Nutrition & Metabolism from the University of Alberta in Canada, and a PhD in Population Nutrition from the National Institute of Public Health in Mexico. Her research focuses on the impact of reproductive and perinatal factors across the life course on women’s long-term health. She is particularly interested in the effect of pregnancy complications, such as hypertensive disorders of pregnancy and gestational diabetes, on women’s cognitive function in middle age.

Dr. Yi is a Thomas O. Pyle Research Fellow in the Department of Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute. Li has focused his research on investigating the impact of the neighborhood built environment and greenness on health behaviors and chronic disease outcomes. His current work intersects the fields of environmental epidemiology, health behavioral research, and bioinformatics by integrating smartphones and wearable devices, Big Data analytics, and geographic information systems (GIS) into large prospective cohort studies, including Nurses' Health Studies, Growing Up Today Study, Project Viva, and Maternal and Developmental Risks from Environmental and Social Stressors Study. In the Division of Chronic Disease Research Across the Lifecourse (CoRAL), Li is currently working with Drs. Peter James, Izzuddin Aris, Marie-France Hivert, and Emily Oken on analyses examining the impact of neighborhood characteristics such as greenness exposure, deprivation, walkability on maternal and child health outcomes. Li holds an interdisciplinary PhD in Population, Health and Place from the University of Southern California, an MS in Architectural and Urban Conservation from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MSc in Urban Planning from the University College London.

Dr. Hivert is an Associate Professor in the Department of Population Medicine. She is a clinical investigator with primary focus on the etiology and primordial prevention of obesity and related co-morbidities, particularly type 2 diabetes and gestational diabetes. Her interests also include fetal metabolic programming mechanisms and the integration of genetics, epigenetics, and environmental factors contributing to obesity and related disorders. She is currently involved in many international consortia investigating the genetics determinants of glycemic regulation during and outside of pregnancy. Dr. Hivert is also a practicing Endocrinologist at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Mandy Brown Belfort, M.D., M.P.H. is a practicing neonatologist and Associate Chief of Research in the Department of Pediatrics at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Belfort's research centers on the influence of early-life nutritional exposures on health and developmental outcomes later in life and emphasizes the NICU hospitalization as a critical window of opportunity for effective diet-based interventions in nutritionally vulnerable preterm infants. She has a particular interest in human milk and breastfeeding and has identified long-lasting neurodevelopmental benefits of maternal milk-based diets for both full-term and very preterm infant populations. Her work informs both public health recommendations for breastfeeding and clinical nutritional approaches within neonatal intensive care.

Dr. Chavarro is a Professor of Nutrition and Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Chavarro’s research focuses on understanding how nutritional, lifestyle and metabolic factors influence reproductive events throughout the life course, and how reproductive and pregnancy events impact other aspects of health. Dr. Chavarro has conducted a variety of studies among healthy individuals and among couples undergoing infertility treatment domestically and abroad. He is Principal Investigator of the Nurses’ Health Study 3, an ongoing prospective cohort study that follows more than 49,000 women. He also leads the nutritional component of the EARTH Study, a prospective cohort of couples undergoing infertility treatment at the Massachusetts General Hospital and of the Young Men’s Studies consortium (with sites in Denmark, Spain and the U.S.), which aims to understand how the environment influences testicular function. In Project Viva, Dr. Chavarro’s work includes understanding how growth and health trajectories differ between children born by cesarean delivery from those born by vaginal delivery, and the long-term health consequences of fertility and pregnancy events among mothers of Project Viva participants.

Dr. Harnois-Leblanc is a registered dietitian and postdoctoral research fellow in the Division of Chronic Disease Research Across the Lifecourse (CoRAL) at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute supported by an American Diabetes Association and Thomas O. Pyle Fellowship. She investigates the role of dietary habits on diabetes risk markers from early childhood to late adolescence in Project Viva Cohort using causal inference methods, under the supervision of Drs. Marie-France Hivert and Jessica Young. Before this fellowship, she earned her PhD in Public Health with a specialization in Epidemiology at Université de Montréal investigating the natural history of type 2 diabetes in children and of cardiovascular disease in youth with type 1 diabetes, as well as the role of lifestyle habits on these two conditions. Following her PhD, Soren did a 1-year fellowship in health economy and epidemiology at McGill University examining the healthcare costs of pediatric obesity and estimating cost-effectiveness of a pediatric weight management program. More broadly, her research focuses on the prevention of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease in at-risk children and children from the general population.

Dr. Kleinman is an Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst and is an applied biostatistician with diverse interests. He is involved with many projects at the DPM, including vaccine and bioterrorism surveillance, observational epidemiology, and individual-, practice-, and community-randomized interventions. Dr. Kleinman also consults within the DPM and HPHC on various statistical issues and advises DPM fellows on statistical and methodological aspects of their research projects. His statistical research centers mainly on methods for clustered and longitudinal repeated measures data. He also has interests in the area of missing data methods.

Sheryl Rifas-Shiman is a lead research analyst in the Department of Population Medicine. She is involved with many projects at the DPM including observational epidemiology, surveillance, and randomized interventions. Her research interests include nutrition and other exposures that occur during pregnancy and childhood, and the influence of these experiences on the health of both mother and child. Sheryl has led several analyses in the area of research methodology and predictors of childhood obesity. As an educator, she has advised many research fellows and graduate/medical students on their research projects.

Dr. Switkowski is a Research Scientist in the Department of Population Medicine. Her background is in nutrition science and epidemiology, and she is primarily interested in researching associations of early-life nutrition and feeding practices with child diet quality and health outcomes. She was formerly the Project Viva Project Manager and currently leads Project Viva’s Resource Infrastructure project. Dr. Switkowski received her PhD in Nutritional Epidemiology from the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy.

Dr. Young is an Assistant Professor and Biostatistician in the Department of Population Medicine. Her research focuses on the development and application of statistical methods that may remain valid for estimating the causal effects of time-varying treatment strategies on health outcomes in the face of complex time-varying confounding and selection bias. She has particular interest in failure event outcomes that may be subject to competing risk events and dynamic time-varying treatment strategies; i.e. strategies under which treatment assignment at a given time may depend on time-evolving patient characteristics. Dr. Young received her doctoral degree in Biostatistics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007. Prior to joining DPM, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Research Associate in the Program on Causal Inference at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Dr. Aris is an epidemiologist and a faculty member in the Department of Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School. His research focuses on the paradigm of the developmental origins of health and disease, which postulates that potential drivers of adult chronic disease including obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease have their origins at key stages during the lifecourse. His work in Project Viva focuses on characterizing distinct growth trajectory patterns and milestones in children, and establishing its relationships with early life risk factors as well as later health outcomes. Dr. Aris received his doctoral degree in Epidemiology from the National University of Singapore in 2015. Prior to joining DPM, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Singapore Institute for Clinical Sciences (from 2015 to 2017) and in the Department of Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School (from 2017 to 2019).

Dr. Camargo is a Professor of Emergency Medicine, Medicine, and Epidemiology at Harvard, the Conn Chair in Emergency Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, and a research epidemiologist at the Channing Division of Network Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital - all in Boston. He founded and leads the Emergency Medicine Network (EMNet), an international research collaboration with >240 hospitals. He also works on the role of nutrition in respiratory/allergy disorders, both in large cohort studies and in randomized controlled trials; the health effects of vitamin D are a major focus. Dr. Camargo is Past President of the American College of Epidemiology and has served on several U.S. guidelines, including those on diet, asthma, and food allergy. He has over 1,300 publications, with an H-index of 160.

Abby Fleisch, MD, MPH, is an environmental health researcher at MaineHealth Institute for Research, Attending Physician in pediatric endocrinology and diabetes at MaineHealth, Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Tufts University School of Medicine, and Adjunct Associate Professor of Environmental Health at Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Fleisch’s research is focused on the extent to which exposure to environmental toxicants prenatally and across the lifespan impact cardiometabolic and musculoskeletal health. Dr. Fleisch’s research, including work within Project Viva, has demonstrated an impact of chemicals such as perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and phthalates on fat distribution and bone health. She has a particular interest in understanding vulnerable exposure windows, dietary confounding, potential mitigating effects of diet/lifestyle, and the health impact of multi-chemical exposure. Dr. Fleisch’s goal is for her research to help inform environmental policy and bridge to feasible public health interventions.

Dr. James is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences at University of California, Davis School of Medicine, where he directs the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health. He is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. James's research focuses on estimating the influence of geographic contextual factors, including exposure to nature, the built environment, the food environment, air pollution, light pollution, noise, and socioeconomic factors, on health behaviors and chronic disease. More recently, he is developing methodologies to assess real-time, high spatio-temporal resolution objective measures of location and behavior by linking smartphone-based global positioning systems (GPS) and wearable device accelerometry data to understand how contextual factors influence health behaviors.

Dr. Nichols is a Registered Dietitian and Postdoctoral Fellow in the Division of Chronic Disease Research Across the Lifecourse in the Department of Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in anthropology and English from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a Master of Science in Nutrition and Food Science from Colorado State University, and a Doctor of Philosophy from The University of Texas at Austin. Building on her extensive experience in maternal and child nutrition, her interdisciplinary research focuses on the nutritional, biological, and social aspects of the preconception period through the first 1000 days with an emphasis on modifiable determinants that affect the lifecourse. Leveraging data from Project Viva, the focus of her fellowship is to examine the extent to which evidence of impaired fertility will be associated with body composition, bone health, and cardiometabolic outcomes among females in midlife. Previously, her doctoral work utilized advanced trajectory modeling to investigate effects of prenatal nutrition exposures on short-term maternal and neonatal outcomes in high-risk pregnancies affected by obesity or multiple gestations and was partially funded by the American Society for Nutrition and the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

Jan L. Shifren, MD, is the Vincent Trustees Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology at Harvard Medical School. She is a reproductive endocrinologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Director of the MGH Midlife Women’s Health Center. Dr. Shifren attained her medical degree from Harvard Medical School and completed her residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Brigham and Women’s and Massachusetts General Hospitals. She then completed a fellowship in Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility at the University of California, San Francisco.

Dr. Shifren currently divides her time among patient care, teaching, and research. She focuses her research on menopause, including the effects of estrogens, androgens and alternative therapies on menopausal symptoms and sexual function. Dr. Shifren has served as Principal Investigator and Co-Investigator for several important studies related to the menopause. She has published numerous articles, abstracts, and book chapters and has delivered national and international presentations on menopausal hormone therapy, androgens for women, female sexual function, and the genitourinary syndrome of menopause. Dr. Shifren is active in numerous professional societies and is a past President of the Menopause Society.

Dr. Taveras is Chief of the Division of General Academic Pediatrics and Executive Director of the Kraft Center for Community Health at Massachusetts General Hospital. She is also Conrad Taff Professor of Pediatrics in the Field of Nutrition at Harvard Medical School and Professor in the Department of Nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her research interests include nutrition and physical activity as they affect child health and childhood obesity prevention. Dr. Taveras is a recipient of the Physician Faculty Scholars Program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to examine opportunities for childhood obesity prevention among underserved populations. Dr. Taveras trained in Pediatrics at Children's Hospital Boston and Boston Medical Center and received her Master's Degree in Public Health from the Harvard School of Public Health.

Dr. Zhang is an epidemiologist and faculty member in the Department of Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School. His research vision is to investigate the effects of early life environmental pollutants on the health of pregnant people and their children, prioritizing communities that have been historically underrepresented in research. Mingyu previously served as Biostatistician for the National Institutes of Health-supported Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Data Analysis Center, and he has experience in leading and implementing the analysis of observational and randomized clinical trial data. Mingyu holds PhD (Environmental Epidemiology) and MHS (Cardiovascular and Clinical Epidemiology) degrees from the Johns Hopkins University.