Caitlin G. Howe, Ph.D. from the University of Southern California, Keck School of Medicine, Department of Preventive Medicine

Worldwide, more than 140 million people are exposed to arsenic, a toxic metalloid that has been associated with numerous adverse health outcomes. Although inter-individual differences in susceptibility have been observed, the factors contributing to this and the underlying mechanisms are not fully understood. In this talk, I will discuss arsenic toxicity in the context of nutritional status, life stage, and complex metal mixture exposures and will describe some of the potential epigenetic mechanisms underlying these effects.

Dr. Caitlin Howe is an environmental epidemiologist with a focus on metals toxicity. She received her Ph.D. in Environmental Health Sciences from Columbia University, where she examined nutritional influences on arsenic toxicity in a highly exposed population in Bangladesh. As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern California, Dr. Howe has continued to investigate the toxic effects of arsenic in addition to other metals, but with a focus on populations in the United States. She has also evaluated the effects of diverse exposures on the epigenome. Increasingly, Dr. Howe has become interested in the health impacts of complex environmental mixtures, and was recently awarded a K99 grant from the NIEHS to investigate how metal mixture exposures during pregnancy affect fetal growth in the MADRES study, a predominately low-income Hispanic pregnancy cohort in Los Angeles.