T32 Program Oversight

Program oversight is provided during the monthly meetings of the T32 Executive Committee (Drs. Thurston, Oakes, Love, McCall, and Johnson), and by the T32 External Advisory Board (EAB). EAB meetings take place annually, followed by a written evaluation. In addition, this program benefits from trainer input throughout the year and during meetings with all T32 trainers. Finally, annual evaluations from the trainees are critical to ensure that the program is effective in meeting the training goals while accommodating the interests of the trainees in a supportive environment.

The presentations given by your trainees at our annual EAB meetings demonstrate the excellent research opportunities provided to them combined with the strong and supportive mentoring they are provided by your T32 faculty team...” 
^{– External Advisory Board, 2024}

The current External Advisory Board members are:

• Dr. Brent Coull (2020-present, chair) is Professor of Biostatistics and Professor of Environmental Health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Associate Chair of the Department of Biostatistics. Dr. Coull has 20 years’ experience in a wide range of environmental health research, including on the development and application of statistical methods for the assessment of the health effects of air pollution and children’s environmental health, and methods for analyzing the health effects of complex environmental mixtures. Dr. Coull is the Program Director of his department’s T32 Environmental Statistics grant.
• Dr. Ernest Fokoue (2015-present) is Professor of Statistics in the School of Mathematical Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology. Dr. Fokoue is co-author of the Springer text Principles and Theory for Data Mining and Machine Learning. His research interests include statistical methods for extremely high dimensional data such as occur in proteomics and genomics. Dr. Fokoue is also very active in the local statistical community, including as chair of the annual UpStat conference.
• Dr. Lianne Sheppard (2024-present) is Interim Chair of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, the Rohm and Haas Endowed Professor in Public Health Sciences at the University of Washington, and professor in two departments: Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences and Biostatistics. Dr. Sheppard has extensive experience studying the health effects of occupational and environmental exposures. In her work on air pollution, she seeks to better understand the role of exposure assessment design and modeling in inference about air pollution health effects. Dr. Sheppard served as Chair of the EPA Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee and as a member of the EPA Scientific Advisory Board.

The program has also benefitted from former External Advisory Board members:

• Dr. Susan Teitelbaum (2015-2024) is Research Professor in the Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She is an environmental and cancer epidemiologist whose research accomplishments have been primarily related to breast cancer and childhood growth and development. Dr. Teitelbaum has considerable experience in conducting environmental epidemiologic field studies, assessing complex exposure mixtures, and analyzing large epidemiologic datasets.
• Dr. Scott Zeger (2015-2020, former chair) is Professor of Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health, with joint appointments in Epidemiology and in International Health. Dr. Zeger was Chair of the Department of Biostatistics for 12 years, and also served as Vice Provost for Research. Dr. Zeger has been instrumental in developing methodology for correlated responses such as arise in longitudinal or clustered data, and is co-author of the Oxford University Press text The Analysis of Longitudinal Data. His research has resulted in many papers on air pollution. Most recently Dr. Zeger’s work has focused in Bayesian models for “individualized health”.