About the Department of Environmental Health

Why Environmental Health?

For more than 100 years, our Department has advanced the field of environmental health through hands-on learning and training. We have a vibrant and rich history of guiding public discourse, as well as national and international leaders, on the most pressing environmental health challenges in the 21st century.

To better serve communities’ changing health, we employ innovative strategies and solutions to increase public awareness. Our work in laboratories, field studies, and cohort studies has led to new understanding of how environmental and occupational exposures affect humans.

Members of our Department create and advance our knowledge of harmful exposures and translate their discoveries into actions that ultimately improve people’s health. Our centers, faculty, students, and staff engage in service activities to expand the capacity of communities by training, mentoring, and empowering the next world leaders.

The Department pursues innovative research and offers interdisciplinary training in environmental health, emphasizing the role of air, water, contaminants in food and consumer products, the built environment, and the workplace as critical determinants of public health. Faculty members study the pathogenesis and prevention of:

• environmentally produced illnesses
• injury and disability
• ergonomics and safety
• climate change
• occupational hygiene
• environmental management and sustainability
  

Our Department is a leading voice and facilitator of scientifically based public health advances. Faculty research areas include molecular and physiologic studies, exposure assessment and control, engineering, epidemiology, risk assessment, and policy evaluation.

The Department examines complex problems that require the contributions of many specialties. The faculty, research staff, and students reflect the multidisciplinary nature of the field and include chemists, engineers, epidemiologists, practitioners, occupational hygienists, urban planners, climatologists, applied mathematicians, physicians, nurses, physiologists, cell biologists, molecular biologists, and microbiologists.

Team

Our History

A century of impact and progress

• 1913 – Harvard-MIT Institute of Technology School for Health Officers is established.
• 1928 – Dr. Philip Drinker, an assistant professor in the Department of Ventilation and Illumination at the emerging Harvard School of Public Health tests the breathing apparatus known as the Drinker Respirator—later dubbed the iron lung— on a young patient at Boston Children’s Hospital on October 12, 1928.
• 1939 – Department of Industrial Hygiene work includes the development of oxygen equipment for high-altitude flights, protective gas masks for chemical warfare, and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems.
• 1946 – New specialties of radiological health and air pollution control introduced.
  Environmental Health Faculty members serve as consultants to the newly created Atomic Energy Commission.
• 1947 – Dr. Ross McFarland founds certificate program in Aviation Medicine and helps develop standards for comfort and safety in transatlantic flights.
• Mid-1950s: The Departments of Industrial Hygiene, Physiology, and Sanitation Engineering become the Division of Environmental Health and Engineering Sciences under Dr. James L. Whittenberger. Division of Environmental Health and Engineering Sciences becomes part of Kresge Center for Environmental Health.
• 1960s –  The Department continues its historic interest in the relationship between occupational exposures and occupational disease with research efforts aimed at identifying and mitigating impacts of job-related hazards, including studies of toluene di-isocyanate (TDI) and lead toxicity; evaluations of health hazards involved in fire fighting and rubber tire manufacturing; respiratory disease in granite cutting, talc mining, and meat packing; and mortality in a number of different types of manufacturing. 
• 1973 – Faculty members Benjamin Ferris and his colleague Frank Speizer propose The Harvard Six Cities Study, a first-of-its-kind study to examine the health effects of air pollution in urban environments in the United States.
• 1976 – The Nurses’ Health Study (NHS) is established by Speizer and has since launched two additional cohorts. It is among the largest prospective investigations into the risk factors for major chronic diseases in women.
• 1983 – Environmental Health Sciences, Sanitary Engineering, and Physiology merge and become Environmental Sciences and Physiology.
• 1991 – Environmental Sciences and Physiology is officially renamed the Department of Environmental Health.
• 1993 – The Harvard Six Cities Study finds that fine particulate pollution is linked with mortality at much lower levels than previously thought, leading to new clean air standards being put in place by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). 
• 2023 – Environmental Health faculty publish new cost-benefit analysis of lead pipe replacement, leading to EPA to revise recommendations about lead and copper levels in drinking water, and prioritize the replacement of lead pipes in water supply lines, schools, child care facilities, and homes.