Moderated By
Ivan Oransky, MD
Distinguished Writer in Residence, NYU's Arthur Carter Journalism Institute
Co-Founder, Retraction Watch
President, Association of Health Care Journalists
Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine, NYU School of Medicine
Ivan Oransky, M.D., is Distinguished Writer In Residence at NYU’s Carter Journalism Institute and blogs at Embargo Watch and at Retraction Watch. Formerly, he was global editorial director of MedPage Today, executive editor at Reuters Health, the managing editor for online at Scientific American, and deputy editor of The Scientist.
He received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University, where he was executive editor of The Harvard Crimson, his medical degree from New York University, and completed an internship at Yale before leaving medicine to be a full-time journalist. A 2012 TEDMED speaker, he is the recipient of the 2015 John P. McGovern Medal for excellence in biomedical communication from the American Medical Writers Association, and in 2017 was awarded an honorary doctorate in civil laws from The University of the South (Sewanee). Ivan, who holds an appointment at the NYU School of Medicine as a clinical assistant professor of medicine, has also taught at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism and has written for publications from Nature to the New York Times. Ivan is also president of the Association of Health Care Journalists. You can follow him at @IvanOransky.
Presenters
Martin J. Blaser, MD
Muriel G. and George W. Singer Professor of Translational Medicine
Professor of Microbiology
Director, Human Microbiome Program
NYU School of Medicine
Martin J. Blaser is the Singer Professor of Medicine, Professor of Microbiology, and Director of the Human Microbiome Program at the NYU School of Medicine. He served as Chair of the Department of Medicine from 2000-2012. A physician and microbiologist, Dr. Blaser is interested in understanding the relationships we have with our persistently colonizing bacteria. His work focused on Campylobacter species and Helicobacter pylori, which also are model systems for understanding the interactions of residential bacteria with their hosts. Over the last 15 years, he has been actively studying the relationship of the human microbiome with health and important diseases as asthma, obesity, diabetes, and allergies. Dr. Blaser has served as President of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, Chair of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Cancer Institute, and Chair of the Advisory Board for Clinical Research of the NIH. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy for Arts and Sciences. He holds 28 U.S. patents, and has authored over 550 original articles. Recently, he wrote Missing Microbes, a book targeted to general audiences.
Research
Helen Link Egger, MD
Arnold Simon Professor and Chair
Director, Child Study Center at Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital of New York at NYU Langone
Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
Dr. Helen Egger is the Arnold Simon Professor and Chair of the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at New York University Langone Health (NYULH) and the Director of the NYULH Child Study Center. Previously, she was Chief of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center and Director of the Early Childhood Research Program in the Duke Center for Developmental Epidemiology. Dr. Egger is a child psychiatrist and epidemiologist whose research focuses on the developmental epidemiology and developmental neuroscience of early childhood psychiatric symptoms and disorders with a focus on anxiety and other emotional disorders. She also collaborates with pediatric mental health experts, computer engineers, software developers, and data scientists to develop apps for parents that use automatic computer vision, interactive design, and machine-learning analytics to screen and monitor young children’s behavior and social emotional development in their homes, schools, and communities. Her team released the first pediatric Apple ResearchKit app, Autism & Beyond, in the fall of 2015 in the US with additional releases in South Africa, Argentina, Turkey, and Singapore this upcoming year. Dr. Egger's goal is to encode in apps the clinical and scientific knowledge within the NYU Langone Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the field of child psychiatry so as to extend clinical and scientific expertise to children and families who do not have access to this knowledge or to mental health care. Her team is currently developing an app for picky eating.
Internationally Renowned Researcher in Developmental Epidemiology of Early Childhood Psychiatric Disorders
Author of the First Interview Tool to Diagnose Mental Health Disorders in Preschoolers
Co-Creator, First Pediatric Apple ResearchKit App, Autism and Beyond
Board Member of Zero to Three, a National Organization Focused on Infants, Toddlers, and Families
Research
Akhgar Ghassabian, MD, PhD
Dr. Ghassabian is an investigator and Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at Departments of Pediatrics, Population Health, and Environmental Medicine, New York University School of Medicine. Her research interests primarily center on identifying environmental exposures that contribute to the etiology of developmental disabilities in childhood. Dr. Ghassabian is currently focusing on investigations that characterize environmental exposures using biomarkers in pregnant women and children. Prior to joining New York University School of Medicine, Dr. Ghassabian was the Intramural Research Training Award (IRTA) fellow at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).
Dr. Ghassabian obtained her Medical Degree from Tehran University of Medical Sciences and completed a Master’s and a PhD in epidemiology at Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands (2013). During her doctoral and postdoctoral training, Dr. Ghassabian was actively involved in birth cohort studies in Europe and in the U.S., i.e., Generation R and Upstate KIDS. She was also a collaborator on European epidemiological consortia examining the effect of nutrition (NUTRIMENTHE) and air pollution (ESCAPE) on children’s neurodevelopment. Dr. Ghassabian is the recipient of the Rubicon Award from The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) in 2014 for a project on the brain basis of autism.
Research
Susannah Meadows
Author of “The Other Side of Impossible”
The New York Times journalist
Susannah Meadows is the author of the 2017 book, “The Other Side of Impossible: Ordinary People Who Faced Daunting Medical Challenges and Refused to Give Up.” It’s based on the 2013 New York Times Magazine story she wrote about her young son’s unlikely recovery from juvenile idiopathic arthritis. It was one of the most widely viewed and emailed articles on the paper’s website that year. The book has been called “Remarkable,” by Good Morning America, “A wonder,” by The National Book Review, “A must-read,” by Psychology Today, and “Really moving and inspiring,” by Buzzfeed. In The New York Times, Jane Brody wrote, “Meadows has compiled compelling stories that left me in awe.”
Meadows is a former Senior Writer for Newsweek. She has been a frequent contributor to The New York Times, most recently writing a column for the Arts section about books, along with reviews. The stories she’s covered include the 2004 presidential campaign, the aftermath of 9/11, Columbine, Hurricane Katrina, and the Duke lacrosse scandal. She has appeared on CBS This Morning, Good Morning America, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, Charlie Rose, and The Brian Lehrer Show. She lives with her husband and their twin sons in Brooklyn.
Research
Lisa Sasson, RD MS CDN,
Clinical Assistant Professor, Nutrition
Director, Dietetic Internship
NYU Steinhardt
Lisa Sasson is a registered dietitian and a clinical assistant professor at New York University’s Department of Nutrition and Food. In this role, she directs the graduate dietetic internship and NYU’s study abroad in Tuscany, Italy: Its Cuisine and the Mediterranean Diet. She also teaches a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses. She works with the NYU dental faculty to advance nutrition and oral health in the dental curriculum.
In addition to her work at NYU, Lisa counsels private clients in healthy eating and weight management. She is a consultant to public affairs at Nickelodeon, a division of Viacom Media, on health and wellness.
Lisa was a member of the food processing working group for Global Reporting Initiative, a non profit organization that developed the world’s most widely used sustainability reporting guidelines.
Research
Leonardo Trasande, MD
Chief of Division of Environmental Pediatrics
Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Environmental Medicine & Population Health
NYU School of Medicine
Leonardo Trasande is a tenured associate professor in pediatrics, environmental medicine and population health at the NYU School of Medicine, in health policy at the NYU Wagner School of Public Service, and at the NYU College of Global Public Health. Dr. Trasande's research focuses on identifying the role of environmental exposures in childhood obesity and cardiovascular risks, and documenting the economic costs for policy makers of failing to prevent diseases of environmental origin in children proactively. Dr. Trasande is perhaps best known for a series of studies in Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology and the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, which identified diseases and disabilities due to endocrine disrupting chemicals costing $340 billion/year (2.3% of GDP) in the US and €163 billion/year (1.2% of GDP) in Europe.
He has previously served on: a United Nations Environment Programme Steering Committee which published a Global Outlook on Chemicals in 2013 ; the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and the Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee for the World Trade Center Health Program. He also currently serves on the Executive Committee of the Council for Environmental Health of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Dr. Trasande earned a Master's degree in Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School. He completed a pediatrics residency at Boston Children's Hospital, a Dyson Foundation Legislative Fellowship in the office of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, and a fellowship in environmental pediatrics at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. He has testified before the Senate's Environment and Public Works committee and Democratic Policy Committee. His work has been featured on the CNN documentary Planet in Peril and in National Geographic, and frequently appears on national media, including NBC's Today Show, ABC's Evening News and National Public Radio.
Trasande leads one of 35 cohort centers in the Environmental Influences of Child Health Outcomes Program (ECHO) which together are leveraging team science to identify the environmental and preventable origins of childhood chronic disease. He is also PI of an R01 (ES022972) studying prenatal and childhood phthalate and bisphenol A exposures in a large Dutch birth cohort (Generation R) to examine obesity and cardiovascular risks; and another R01 in which he is studying the effect of these dietary contaminants (DK100307) in children with chronic kidney disease, with the hypothesis that these exposures create oxidant stress and accelerate disease progression.
Previously funded work has compared (U01OH010394; U01OH01714) cardiometabolic and respiratory profiles of children exposed to the World Trade Center disaster to a matched comparison group, and chemical exposures that may drive these effects. This study emerged from clinical experience documenting a substantially high prevalence of children with elevated blood pressure in a clinically referred sample of children exposed to the disaster and elevations in adverse cardiometabolic profiles in relationship to exposure to dust exposures. He has a long-standing track record of collaboration funded by NIH in China (R24TW005962) and Mexico (R21ES018723) examining air pollution and methylmercury exposure and their impacts on child health.
Research
Organizer
Natalya Murakhver
Natalya is the co-founder of Apple to Zucchini, a family wellness consultancy. She has written for Allergic Living, Kiwi Magazine, Organic Gardening and others. She served as the co-editor on “They Eat That,” a cultural encyclopedia of weird and exotic food from around the world, which was published by Greenwood Press in January 2012. Natalya earned a Masters of Arts in Food Studies from NYU and lives on the Upper West Side with her husband and two daughters.