About our principal investigator
Dr. Susan Teitelbaum, PhD, MPH
Susan Teitelbaum, PhD, MPH, is Professor and Director, Division of Environment Epidemiology, in the Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Dr. Teitelbaum earned her MPH and PhD in Epidemiology, from Columbia University.
She is a classically trained environmental and cancer epidemiologist with extensive experience in conducting epidemiologic field studies. Her research focuses on several areas of the impact of environmental exposures: in World Trade Center responder health, in childhood growth and development and in breast cancer.
As Deputy Director of the World Trade Center (WTC) Health Program General Responder Data Center that manages and analyzes the “big data” repository of exposure and health related data for more than 30,000 WTC responders, she has authored several important publications related to the health of the WTC responders. Currently, she is PI on a CDC/NIOSH funded cohort study of New York Area Workers that will be used as a comparison group for the WTC General Responder Cohort.
Dr. Teitelbaum’s interest in children’s health began as the co-PI of the Growing Up Healthy Study, part of a consortium examining environmental exposures as determinants of early development in 1,200 young girls. She is currently director of the innovative Children’s Health Exposure Analysis Resource (CHEAR) Data Center (now renewed as the HHEAR Data Center; 1st H=Human), which has developed cutting-edge technology that harmonizes disparate study data to enable the investigation of environmental research hypotheses that could not otherwise be addressed. She is also a multiple PI on an ECHO (Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes) cohort study that is investigating the role of early life exposure to environmental chemicals and later health outcomes in children born prematurely.
Since its inception, Dr. Teitelbaum has been involved with the Long Island Breast Cancer Study Project (LIBCSP), a large population-based case-control study of the environment and breast cancer which included over 3,000 women. While a doctoral student, she was Project director. She subsequently obtained a career development award using LIBCSP data and was co-PI of an NIEHS-funded LIBCSP-based translational research project. Her career-long work with breast cancer advocates has enabled her to successfully translate and communicate the intricacies of epidemiologic studies and their research findings to the lay public.
Known for her enthusiasm and expertise for teaching epidemiology, she is a sought-after lecturer in many Mount Sinai courses. She is an active mentor for post-doctoral fellows and graduate students. She is a frequent invited speaker on environmental exposures and cancer epidemiology locally, nationally and internationally. Dr. Teitelbaum has served as a member of several large NIH initiatives and has served on many NIH and DOD study sections. She is a frequent reviewer for several high impact environmental health and cancer research journals.
If you would like to learn more about her work, please follow the link here
