From the Workplace to the Population: Exposure and Prevention

Julius Fobil is a Professor of environmental health with an outstanding academic career; having contributed significantly to the field of environmental epidemiology in Ghana and beyond. He has >100 peer review publications in the field and has trained more 80 students at undergraduate through doctoral to postdoctoral levels. He is a fellow of the Collegium Ramazzini, an academy of internationally renowned fellows in environmental and occupational health and a fellow of Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Fobil is the Provost of the University of Ghana’s College of Health Sciences; having previously served as Dean of its School of Public Health. In addition, he serves as the Interim Director of the West Africa Center for Global Environmental and Occupational Health, which based in University of Ghana and as an Associate Scientist at the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg. His research focuses on environmental exposure assessment; including such assessments in the informal sector economy, urban environmental health in low-income economies and more recently, he has been involved in research capacity building in environmental and occupational health in West and Central Africa region.

Jian Li received his Medical degree in 1997 from the Tongji Medical University, China; Ph.D. degree of Public Health in 2005 from the Seoul National University, Republic of Korea; and Doctoral degree of Safety Sciences in 2012 from the University of Wuppertal, Germany. Now, he is working at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Public Health and School of Nursing as a full professor in the United Sates.

Dr. Li is a well-recognized occupational epidemiologist in the field of “Work, Stress, and Health” worldwide. His research focuses on work stress questionnaire development and validation; the effects of adverse working conditions on health, well-being, and productivity; health promotion and intervention in the workplaces as well. Dr. Li has published more than 170 scientific papers in peer-reviewed academic journals, and been invited to present his research work at international conferences.

Since 2006, Dr. Li has received three Early Career Awards from the International Society of Behavioral Medicine (ISBM), the American Psychological Association (APA)/National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)/Society for Occupational Health Psychology (SOHP), and the Stress and Anxiety Research Society (STAR), respectively. Currently, he serves on several national and international organizations, such as the U.S. Cancer, Reproductive, Cardiovascular and Other Chronic Disease Prevention (CRC) Cross-Sector Council member, National Occupational Research Agenda (NORA); member of Scientific Committees on Work Organisation and Psychosocial Factors, and on Cardiology in Occupational Health, International Commission on Occupational Health (ICOH). For 20 years, Dr. Li has been actively collaborating with an extensive international network across Asia, Europe, and North America.

David Michaels PhD, MPH is an epidemiologist and professor at the George Washington University School of Public Health. His primary expertise is in worker safety and health, and he has held Senate-confirmed public health positions in the administrations of President Barack Obama (in which he was Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health) and President Bill Clinton (Assistant Secretary of Energy for Environment, Safety and Health). He served on the Biden Transition COVID Advisory Board and is a member of the Lancet COVID-19 Commission’s Task Force on Safe Work, Safe School, and Safe Travel.

Dr. David Prezant is the Chief Medical Officer for the Fire Department of the City of New York (FDNY). Dr. Prezant directs all medical protocol development for both day-to-day operations and homeland security issues. He is also Co-Director of the FDNY World Trade Center Medical Monitoring Program and the Senior Pulmonary Consultant for FDNY. Dr. Prezant is a member of the Institute of Medicine's Committee on Personal Protective Equipment in the Workplace, the National Fire Protection Association's Health and Safety Committee, and the International Association of Firefighters Redmond Medical Advisory Board. He is a Professor of Medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine; Director of Albert Einstein Medical School's Pulmonary Course for medical students and the Research Director for their Unified Pulmonary Division.

Dr. Prezant responded on 9/11/01 to the World Trade Center and was present during the collapse and its aftermath. Since that day, he and Dr. Kelly (FDNY's Chief Medical Officer at the Bureau of Health Services) have initiated a multi-million-dollar medical monitoring and treatment program for FDNY firefighters funded by FDNY, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). Dr. Prezant is the Principal Investigator for the FDNY Data Coordinating Center for the World Trade Center (WTC) Medical Monitoring Program and is on the Steering Committee for the WTC Medical Monitoring Program. He served as a member of the EPA WTC Technical Advisory Committee, the NYC Dept of Health WTC Registry Scientific Advisory Board, the NYS Governor's WTC panel and the NYC Mayor's medical advisory board.

Dr. Prezant has written extensively on pulmonary physiology, firefighter health and safety and since 9/11 on the health impact of World Trade Center Collapse on NYC Firefighters and EMS rescue workers. His group was the first to describe WTC Cough Syndrome (New England Journal of Medicine 2002) and has published extensively on this subject in the CDC MMWR, American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, Chest and Environmental Health Perspectives. His major research interest is in determining the mechanisms responsible for accelerated decline in longitudinal pulmonary function and/or airway hyperreactivity in firefighters after WTC exposure. Other interests are in determining the mechanisms responsible for the increased incidence of sarcoidosis in firefighters after WTC exposure.

Dr. Michelle Turner is the winner of the inaugural EPICOH Mid-Career Award. Dr. Turner is an associate research professor at ISGlobal in Barcelona where she leads work in various areas of occupational epidemiology. The author of over 100 publications, she also provides leadership to many international collaborative efforts. She is the one of the leaders of the 40-country European OMEGA-NET effort, which seeks to optimize the use of occupational, industrial and population cohorts in Europe. This effort, which currently contains information on over 100 cohorts has been a major step in promoting occupational health research in Europe. Dr. Turner has also conducted numerous studies of occupational radiation exposures, including within the INterOCC collaborative study focused on brain tumor risk. In addition to her primary appointment at ISGlobal, she is also a Visiting Scientist at IARC, where she has participated in the Secretariat of multiple monographs. In 2016 she helped to co-organize the EPICOH meeting in Barcelona.

Alejandra Vives received her MD from the Universidad de Chile, her Specialist in Public Health from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and her MPH and PhD from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. She currently is an Associate Professor at the Department of Public Health of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC), a researcher at the Center for Sustainable Urban Development (CEDEUS) and the SALURBAL project (Salud Urbana en América Latina). She is the Principal Investigator of the RUCAS project and a member of the ECoTES network for employment conditions surveys in Latin America. An expert in social epidemiology, her main lines of research are on the health effects of employment conditions, including precarious employment, informal employment and own account work, and in urban health. She collaborates and participates in national and international studies with academics from countries within and outside Latin America. She teaches social epidemiology, research methodology and occupational health in the graduate programs of the PUC Department of Public Health.