Project Examples

In a single word, my experience has to be rated A+.” _{– T32 trainee}

Examples of projects that have involved T32 trainees include studies of:

• The developmental effects of prenatal exposure to methylmercury from maternal fish consumption in the Seychelles Child Development Study, which now consists of three cohorts with multiple outcomes measured at multiple ages
• The associations between multiple phthalate metabolites measured early in pregnancy and markers of placental vasculature
• The associations between weekly air pollution exposure in pregnancy and maternal sex steroid levels across pregnancy

I've learned a ton about communication with collaborators and how to organize and present work/results.” _{– T32 trainee}

• The causal effect of in utero air pollution exposure on infant anogenital distance at birth
• The effects of perfluorinated alkyl substances on ovarian hormone concentrations in fertile women
• RNA sequencing to quantify the effect of dioxin exposure on CD8+ T-cell gene expression accounting for an unknown mixture of responders and non-responders
• The effect of air pollution on the transcriptomics of the immune response to respiratory infection

These and other projects have introduced trainees to modern statistical methods such as quantile g-computation and weighted quantile sum regression for exposure mixtures, and distributed lag models for examining delayed exposure effects. Projects have also led to methodological research on topics such as models for multiple longitudinal outcomes, causal inference, exposure effects on mixtures of hormone trajectories, and Dirichlet process mixture models, and has been the basis of a number of PhD theses.