SCEHSC Seminar with Heather Stapleton, PhD

Guest Speaker: Heather Stapleton, PhD

Title: The Personal Chemical Exposome: Using Silicone Wristbands to Support Exposomics Research

Date: March 1st, 2024

Exposomics research seeks to characterize environmental exposures over the life course and understand the interactions with biological responses that contribute to disease risks. However, the human “environment” is incredibly complex and dynamic, particularly over an individual’s lifespan. Our diet, behavior, occupation, and housing all strongly influence our chemical and non-chemical exposures. Critical to exposomics research is the need to evaluate exposures that occur over the course of a lifetime to better understand disease risks, although this is incredibly challenging. Studies to date have utilized human tissues (e.g. blood) to characterize both exogenous and endogenous chemicals and examine associations with disease state in cross-sectional studies. Characterizing and measuring chemical exposures in blood and urine, while often ideal, does have some limitations, and there is a need to pair ambient and personal measures of chemical exposures with biological measurements. Over the last decade, wearable personal exposure tools have evolved to help fill these gaps in evaluating exposures over time. One of these tools, the silicone wristband, demonstrates strong promise in providing comprehensive data on exposures to chemicals in the ambient environment, and can be used to examine changes in exposure over time. This talk will highlight current research that utilizes silicone wristbands to measure the personal chemical exposome, discussing the strengths and weaknesses of these wearable sensors. In addition, this talk will highlight research that has used silicone wristbands to understand associations with internal dose, exposures over different life stages, and examples of their utilization in One Health research and in occupational settings.

Dr. Heather Stapleton is an environmental chemist and exposure scientist in the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. Her research interests focus on identification of halogenated and organophosphate chemicals in building materials, furnishings and consumer products, and estimation of human exposure, particularly in vulnerable populations such as pregnant women and children. Her laboratory utilizes mass spectrometry, including targeted and nontargeted approaches, to characterize chemical burdens in both environmental samples and biological tissues to support environmental health research. Currently she serves as the Director for the Duke Superfund Research Center, and Director of the Duke Environmental Analysis Laboratory, which is part of NIH’s Human Health Environmental Analysis Resource.