Marissa Chan, MS
Marissa Chan is an Afro-Caribbean and Chinese PhD student in Population Health Sciences within the Department of Environmental Health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her research interests and work experience surround environmental justice and beauty justice, specifically focusing on the intersection of place-based environmental hazards and product-based exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) in personal care products.
Sabah Usmani, MCP
Sabah Usmani is an PhD student in the Climate and Health Program at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. She is an urban planner and interdisciplinary researcher from India with experience across geographic scales in air pollution and health disparities, transportation, energy and water, and climate mitigation and adaptation planning in India, USA, Ecuador, and Malaysia.
Carolyn E. Ramírez, PhD
Carolyn E. Ramírez completed their Ph.D. in chemical engineering at Northwestern University in June of 2022. They studied physical organic chemistry in graduate school, focusing on nonlinear spectroscopy of artificial photosynthetic compounds for use in solar cells.
Kevin P. Patterson, MPH
Kevin is an incoming Diné PhD student in Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. His research investigates the distribution of metal exposures (uranium, arsenic, etc.) in groundwater and diet across US indigenous communities and their relationship with related health outcomes.
Lisbeth Iglesias-Rios, PhD, MPH, MA
Dr. Iglesias-Ríos’s research interests are the intersection of environmental and occupational health with precarious employment and labor exploitation in vulnerable populations. Her previous research assessed the impact of labor trafficking by studying how patterns of violence and coercion affect the mental health of female and male trafficking survivors including children, adolescents and adults.
Candis M. Hunter, PhD, MSPH, REHS
Dr. Candis M. Hunter is an Environmental Health Scientist with research interests in environmental justice, food accessibility, community engagement, implementation science, and children’s health to advance health equity and multisector partnerships. She received her BS in Chemistry from Spelman College and her MSPH with a dual concentration in Environmental & Occupational Health and Epidemiology from Emory University Rollins School of Public Health.
JoRee LaFrance
JoRee LaFrance – also known as Iichiinmáatchileesh/Fortunate with Horses – comes from the Apsáalooke/Crow Nation located in southeastern Montana. She holds a B.A. in Earth Sciences and Native American Studies from Dartmouth College and is now a doctoral student in the Department of Environmental Science at the University of Arizona.
Gabriel I. Gadsden, MS
Gabriel is a native of North Carolina and a Ph.D. student of Environmental Sciences at Yale University’s School of the Environment, interested in the interface of energy justice, urban ecology, and health. For his dissertation, he focuses on how disparities in energy-efficient housing are affecting urban rodent disease and allergen exposure in Philadelphia.
Denise Moreno Ramírez, PhD, MS
Denise is a Mexican Indigenous Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Toxicology and Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health at The University of Arizona (UA). Her research focuses on understanding how volatile organic compounds interact in workplace air and impact low-wage, minority workers in small business beauty salons and auto shops in Tucson, Arizona.
Valerisa Joe-Gaddy, PhD
Dr. Valerisa Joe-Gaddy is originally from Gallup, NM and is of the Diné (Navajo) people. Dr. Joe-Gaddy is an Alumna of the University of Arizona receiving both her PhD ad MS in Environmental Science with an emphasis in microbiology. Prior to UArizona, she received her BS in Microbiology from New Mexico State University.
Alexa White, MS
Alexa White is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan. Alexa is working to increase the number of scientists and engineers of color involved in community-led environmental justice research through her role as co-founder and executive director of her think tank, the AYA Research Institute.
Robbie M. Parks, PhD
As an environmental epidemiologist with a background in physics, Dr. Robbie M. Parks has diverse experience in large-scale multi-disciplinary quantitative research focused on climate-related exposures and public health. He is currently a NIH NIEHS K99/R00 Fellow at Columbia University, and will be an Assistant Professor at Columbia University in Environmental Health Sciences from Spring 2023.
