My research focuses on understanding how environmental exposures interact with biological systems to influence human health and disease. We combine environmental health data science, computational toxicology, and experimental models to identify environmental factors associated with disease and investigate the biological mechanisms through which they act.
A major component of this work is the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD), which I have helped lead and develop since 2001. CTD integrates manually curated information about environmental chemicals, genes and proteins, biological phenotypes, diseases, and human exposure. By connecting these different types of information, we can move beyond asking whether an exposure is associated with a disease to investigate the genes, pathways, and biological processes that may link them. We are also developing new computational and data-science approaches to extract, integrate, rank, and interpret these relationships across the scientific literature and large environmental health datasets.
An increasing focus of my laboratory is translating these computational findings into experimentally testable questions. We use zebrafish as an in vivo vertebrate model to investigate how environmental exposures alter biological processes implicated in human disease. Our current work is particularly interested in environmental contributions to neurodegenerative disease and in gene–environment interactions that may make some individuals more susceptible to environmental insults. For example, we are combining CTD-based chemical prioritization with genetically modified zebrafish models to investigate how environmental chemicals affect oxidative stress, mitochondrial function, neuronal health, and behavior in the context of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and other neurodegenerative diseases. These studies provide a way to experimentally test hypotheses generated from environmental health data and connect molecular responses to effects in specific cell types and whole-animal phenotypes.
Across these projects, our goal is to build stronger connections between environmental exposures, biological mechanisms, and disease. By integrating curated knowledge and large-scale data with experimental models, we aim to identify environmental contributors to disease, understand why particular exposures may be harmful, and provide a stronger mechanistic foundation for protecting human health.