Department of Environmental Health

Kari Nadeau, MD, PhD, is the Chair of the Department of Environmental Health at Harvard School of Public Health where she is also the John Rock Professor of Climate Science and Population Studies. She is  Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and works at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.   She also runs a laboratory and has published over 400+ papers, many in the field of immunology, and allergies and asthma, and climate change solutions. For more than 30 years, she has devoted herself to understanding how environmental and epigenetic factors affect the risk of developing immune dysfunction. Her wet lab laboratory has been studying exposomics and solutions-facing research with policy-oriented outcomes.  She started 4 biotech companies, co started a sustainability seed grant program, and works with the WHO and UN on several projects in environmental and global health. She is the author of The End of Food Allergy and the book is available in eleven languages. Nadeau earned her MD/PhD from Harvard Medical School in 1995, completing her doctoral work in biochemistry, followed by a pediatric residency, and fellowship in Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology, and then joined the Stanford faculty where she was the Naddisy Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics until 2022. She joined Harvard in January 2023. She is an adjunct Clinical Professor at Stanford in the Department of Pediatrics. She is part of the Harvard Medical Faculty Practice and practice…

Dr. Francine Laden is an environmental epidemiologist, who has authored approximately 300 peer-reviewed publications focusing on environmental epidemiology of chronic diseases, including cancer, respiratory and cardiovascular disease. Her research has or is concentrated on the following categories of exposures: air pollution (from ambient and occupational sources), persistent organic pollutants (POPs; organochlorines), secondhand smoke, temperature, and the contextual environment (e.g. built environment and green spaces). She is specifically interested in the geographic distribution of disease risk, incorporating geographic information system technology into large cohort studies to explore risk factors such as the built environment and indicators of socioeconomic status, as well as air pollution. She has published key papers on the association of ambient particulate matter and all cause and cardiovascular mortality in the landmark Harvard Six Cities Study and the Nurses’ Health Study and on the association of diesel exhaust exposures and lung cancer mortality in the trucking industry.

Dr. Laden is a Professor of Environmental Epidemiology and Associate Chair of the Department of Environmental Health and the Director of the NIH/NIEHS T32 Program for Training in Environmental Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School and Brigham & Women’s Hospital. She received her ScD in Epidemi…