Environmental Epigenetics in Toxicology and Public Health

Dr. Fry is Director of the Institute for Environmental Health Solutions and the Carol Remmer Angle Distinguished Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her lab focuses on understanding how environmental exposures to toxic substances are associated with human disease. With a particular focus on genomic and epigenomic perturbations, her lab uses toxicogenomic and systems biology approaches to identify key molecular pathways that associate environmental exposure with diseases. A current focus in the lab is to study prenatal exposure to various environmental contaminants including arsenic, cadmium, and perflourinated chemicals. Dr. Fry aims to understand molecular mechanisms by which such early exposures are associated with long-term health effects in humans. Ultimately, Dr. Fry’s lab aims to identify mechanisms of contaminant-induced disease and the basis for inter-individual disease susceptibility.

Dr. Tollefsbol is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He holds doctorates in molecular biology and osteopathic medicine, trained with National Academy of Science members and has over 200 peer-reviewed publications. Reports highlighting the translatability to the lay public of the discoveries made in his laboratory have appeared in international media representing >50 million readers. Dr. Tollefsbol has been featured as an Investigator in the Spotlight by the NIH as well as a Scientist in the Spotlight by ScienceNow. He is an Associate Editor for Frontiers in Genetics, a contributor to Lewin’s GENES classic textbook and Lead Editor for Elsevier’s Translational Epigenetics Series. Dr. Tollefsbol has been named a “Highly Ranked Scholar worldwide (ScholarGPS). He has been invited for numerous endowed keynote presentations, his research has been highlighted in eScience News and ScienceDaily and he has published 20 scholarly books on topics related to his research.