Join us for our first January SCEHSC & ShARP Seminar, where Dr. Beate Ritz will discuss insights from 25 years of research on Parkinson’s disease in California, focusing on how environmental exposures such as pesticides, air pollution, and metals contribute to disease risk. She will also highlight her team’s recent omics-based studies exploring gene–environment interactions and biological mechanisms underlying disease onset and progression.

Beate Ritz, MD, Ph.D., is a Distinguished Professor of Epidemiology at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health with co-appointments in Environmental Health Sciences and Neurology at the UCLA Geffen School of Medicine. She has co-directed the NIEHS-funded Center for Gene-Environment (GxE) in Parkinson’s disease (PD) at UCLA integrating research across epidemiology, neuroscience, genetics, and clinical medicine. Her lab has focused on occupational and common environmental toxicants that play a role in neurodegeneration and used a range of omics tools to discover biomarkers for environmental risk factors and disease responses. She served on numerous National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine (NAS-IOM) committees, U.S. EPA review panels, and on the Scientific Advisory Board for the California State Air Toxics Assessment program. She served as the chair/vice chair of the Epidemiology department at UCLA, as the President of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE 2018-19), and received the Society for Epidemiology Research (SER) 2022 Ken Rothman Career Achievement Award and the John Goldsmith Career award from the ISEE in 2024.

Please register below to attend the seminar in-person or on Zoom. Please note that due date for lunch orders is noon on Friday, January 9. After this, we will no longer accept lunch orders, but we will still take sign-ups for attendees both on Zoom and in person. Thank you!

Join us for January's second SCEHSC & ShARP Seminar, where Dr. Eick will discuss her ongoing research focusing on how exposure to chemicals in consumer products associate with adverse pregnancy outcomes. She will also discuss how psychosocial stressors can amplify these associations.

Stephanie Eick is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Health at the Emory University Rollins School of Public Health. Her research focuses on the health effects of environmental chemical and non-chemical (i.e., psychosocial) stressors during pregnancy. She has a particular interest in chemical mixtures, as well as understanding how non-chemical stressors can amplify the harmful effects of chemicals. She is also interested biomarkers of stress response, such as oxidative stress and inflammation, and better understanding the biological mechanisms linking chemical and stress exposures to adverse health outcomes. Her research has been funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). Dr. Eick is also a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee on Chemicals, which provides independent scientific advice, information, and recommendation to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA).

Please register below to attend the seminar in-person or on Zoom. Please note that due date for lunch orders is noon on Thursday, January 15. After this, we will no longer accept lunch orders, but we will still take sign-ups for attendees both on Zoom and in person. Thank you!