Environmental Health Faculty, Students Enjoy Successful Conference

Researchers from the UC Department of Environmental Health and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center contributed to the success of a groundbreaking conference on the environmental health in Basel, Switzerland.

"Environment and Health–Bridging South, North, East and West,” was held in Basel Aug. 19-23. It was billed as the first joint conference of three leading scientific societies dedicated to improving public health: the International Society of Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE), the International Society of Exposure Sciences (ISES) and the International Society of Indoor Air Quality (ISIAQ).

The Cincinnati contingent was led by Shuk-Mei Ho, PhD, Jacob G. Schmidlapp Professor and Chair of Environmental Health.

Environmental health faculty members Aimin Chen, MD, PhD, Susan Pinney, PhD, Tiina Reponen, PhD, Erin Haynes, DrPH, Shelley Ehrlich, MD, and Patrick Ryan, PhD, all made presentations at the conference. (Ehrlich and Ryan are also faculty members in the pediatrics department and are based at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.)

Eric Kettleson, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow on Reponen’s team; Robert Herrick, a PhD student mentored by Phinney; and Kanistha Chatterjee, a PhD student mentored by Reponen, also presented.

Chatterjee’s poster assessing indoor air quality within 20 Cincinnati apartments renovated to improve energy efficiency and indoor air quality won third place in the ISIAQ’s student poster competition. The first-place winner was Jacob Mensah-Attipoe, a PhD student mentored by Reponen in her role as visiting professor at the University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio.