The International Society for Environmental Epidemiology is pleased to honor Aaron Cohen, D.Sc., with the 2017 John Goldsmith Award for his sustained and outstanding contributions to the knowledge and practice of environmental epidemiology.
Aaron J Cohen is a Consulting Scientist at the Health Effects Institute (HEI) in Boston, MA. Prior to his retirement from HEI in May 2016, Dr. Cohen led for 26 years HEI's US and international epidemiologic research programs on the adverse effects of air pollution. Past HEI responsibilities included the organization and management of epidemiologic research projects such as the Reanalysis of the American Cancer Society and Six-City studies of air pollution and mortality, multi-city time-series studies of air pollution and daily mortality in Europe, North America, Asia and Latin America and studies of the effects of exposure to low-levels of air pollution. He led HEI's 2004 and 2010 reviews of the literature on the health effects of air pollution in the developing countries of Asia, and initiated HEI's Accountability Research Program, which assesses the health impacts of actions taken to improve air quality.
Since 1999 Dr. Cohen has served as a Temporary Advisor to the World Health Organization (WHO) on the evaluation of epidemiologic evidence, air pollution health impact assessment, and air quality guideline development and has served as a member of International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) working groups on diesel exhaust and outdoor air pollution.
Dr. Cohen co-chaired the Expert Groups that produced estimates of the global burden of disease due to Urban Air Pollution in 2000 and Ambient Air Pollution for the Global Burden of Disease 2010 project, and is a member of the Core Analytic Team of the Global Burden of Disease project at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
Epidemiology is Dr. Cohen's second career. He is also a Registered Respiratory Therapist (AS and BS, Northeastern University), and worked for 15 years in newborn intensive care at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and subsequently as Research Associate in Perinatal Epidemiology, conducting epidemiologic and clinical research on neonatal respiratory disease, and the evaluation of related medical technologies.
Dr. Cohen holds a D.Sc. in Epidemiology (1991), and Masters in Public Health (1985) from the Boston University School of Public Health, where he is adjunct Assistant Professor of Environmental Health. He is also Affiliate Professor of Global Health at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
Dr. Veronica Vieira is an Associate Professor of Public Health at University of California, Irvine. She received her environmental engineering and public health training at MIT, Stanford, and Boston University. Her research is focused on spatiotemporal modeling of exposures and disease risk in environmental epidemiology. She works extensively with reconstructing historic environmental exposures using GIS and has experience modeling environmental contaminants including perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA, a perfluorinated compound (PFC) involved in the manufacturing of Teflon).
Dr. Vieira has been an investigator with the Boston University Superfund Research Program for 15 years where she examines the relationship between mixtures of chemical and non-chemical stressors and behavior outcomes in children using generalized additive models (GAMs). Their application of GAMs for spatial analysis led to the creation of the MapGAM package in the R statistical programming language, of which she is senior author. Dr. Vieira's environmental research is supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. She has recently received funding from the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities to study the contribution of geographic location to racial and socioeconomic disparities in ovarian cancer treatment and survival throughout California.
Dr. Vieira has been an active member of ISEE since 2004 and is co-organizing the 2018 ISES-ISEE Joint Annual Conference in Ottawa Canada.
Angel Dzhambov was born in 1989 in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. In 2015, he graduated with honours from the Medical University of Plovdiv with a Medical Doctor degree. Since 2016 he is a PhD student in Environmental Hygiene and is working as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Hygiene and Ecomedicine at the Medical University of Plovdiv. His research is focused primarily on the effects of environmental and occupational noise as well as urban greenspace on health outcomes. He started his research career as an undergraduate student and has heretofore acted as the first author of 50 papers published in peer-reviewed journals, 30 of which in journals with Impact Factor. He is also a reviewer for several scientific journals such as Environmental Pollution, Environmental Research, Environmental Science and Pollution Research, Urban Forestry and Urban Greening.
Dr. Shelley Liu is an Assistant Professor in the Center for Biostatistics, Department of Population Health Science and Policy at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Abstract Title: Bayesian varying coefficient kernel machine regression to assess cognitive trajectories associated with exposure to complex mixtures
Oral Presentation Session and Time: Evaluation of Exposure to Chemical and Metal Mixtures and Health Effects, Tuesday 26 September, 1600-1615, Ground 026
Ivan is a data scientist at the Australian Centre for Air quality and health Research and evaluation (CAR) specialising in environmental epidemiology. Between 2001 and 2013 he worked closely with Professor Tony McMichael on his Climate Change and Health program at the Australian National University.
Ivan has contributions that span the range from designing study protocols, creating datasets, conducting analyses and communicating results. Alongside his experience in analysis of empirical data Ivan also has experience in scenario-based forecasting in climate change risk assessments.
Abstract Title: Bayesian blending of nitrogen dioxide air pollution data for neighbourhood estimates for health research
Oral Presentation Session and Time: Exposure Assessment Methods, Monday 25 September, 1415-1430, Ground 022
Poster Title: Association between Incense Burning and Childhood Gross Motor Function Development: A Nationwide Birth Cohort Study
Poster Title: Long-term temporal trend of the short-term association between fine particulate matter concentration and hospital admissions in the U.S
Poster Title: Genetic mediation of the effect of ultrafine particles on blood pressure