Research

My laboratory is interested in understanding the complex interactions between our environment and human health. Specifically, we use bioinformatics and comparative genomics approaches to identify and explore molecular pathways that are affected by environmental exposures. Better understanding about these pathways will likely lead to improvements in regulation of exposures and treatment of environmentally influenced diseases. Specifically, we: a) are developing the freely available Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD;http://ctdbase.org), which contains curated and integrated data sets that facilitate development of novel hypotheses about the connections between chemicals, genes and proteins, and diseases; and b) using the zebrafish to dissect pathways that we predict are perturbed by exposures to ubiquitous environmental contaminants like TCDD, bisphenol A and arsenic.