Ivy Torres, second year PhD student in the Disease Prevention track, was awarded a grant from the Southern California NIOSH Education and Research Center to carry out the pilot study titled: "Understanding the Health of Latina/o Immigrant Workers: The Role of Primary Care Providers in Assessing Occupational Histories.” Through semi-structured interviews with primary care providers (PCPs) practicing in federally qualified health centers in Orange County, Ivy is hoping to identify common health conditions afflicting Latina/o immigrant patients; how PCPs screen for occupational exposures; and how PCPs perceive the role of low-wage work in shaping the health of their patients. To successfully carry out this project, Ivy will be working closely with Dr. Alana LeBron (Public Health & Chicano/Latino Studies) and Dr. Cynthia Haq (Family Medicine).

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2019 UCI Chancellor's Club Fellowship Recipients Say Thank You

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We mourn the loss of Dr. Terry Schmidt who died on June 30th 2019. No funeral services will be held as that was Terry's wish. Feel free to visit the online memorial site to express condolences

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Pregnancy complications, including gestational diabetes, gestational hypertension, pre-eclampsia, and eclampsia, are major causes of perinatal morbidity and mortality, and are strongly linked to cardiovascular and metabolic diseases later for both mother and offspring. A very small number of studies suggest that ambient air pollution may increase risk for pregnancy complications; however, these studies have major limitations including lack of high quality data for outcomes, co-morbidities and air pollution exposure estimates, focus on individual air pollutants rather than pollutant mixtures, and lack of understanding of the mediation pathways of maternal co-morbidity. Researchers from UCI and Kaiser Permanente Southern California recently received $2.5 million funding from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) to conduct a 4-year study to elucidate the risk of pregnancy complications from exposure to air pollutant mixtures of both gases and particulate matter. This study is built upon on a longitudinal (pre-conception through postpartum) pregnancy cohort of ~400,000 singleton pregnancies in 2008-2018 that have prospectively-recorded clinical data and residential addresses from the electronic health record of Kaiser Permanente Southern California members. The study will leverage state-of-the-art spatiotemporal air pollution modeling and novel statistical methods with high quality and rich clinical information in the prospective cohort. In addition to the main associations between individual-level air pollution exposure and risk of pregnancy complications, the researchers will examine heterogeneity of risk by socioeconomic status, maternal and other environmental factors (e.g. green space, weather), potential underlying mechanisms, susceptible sub-populations, and time windows of susceptibility. Further, they will examine spatially-varying risk, which can guide a targeted approach, allowing policy-makers to focus on areas where pollution reduction is likely to reap the greatest health benefits. This study has important and broad implications in the U.S. and worldwide, particularly in urban areas with high pollution and rapid urbanization.

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