Margaret Karagas

Professor Karagas is the inaugural chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the Geisel School of Medicine and director of the Centers for Molecular Epidemiology and Children's Environmental Health and Disease Prevention Research at Dartmouth College.  As part of her deep commitment to interdisciplinary training, Professor Karagas collaboratively established an innovative, cross-disciplinary postdoctoral and graduate program in the quantitative biomedical sciences (QBS) that integrates epidemiology, bioinformatics, and biostatistics and mentors diverse investigators at all stages of their career.  Her research interests encompass interdisciplinary studies that seek to illuminate the causes of human disease by investigating emerging environmental exposures, host factors, and mechanisms  -- that impact health from infancy to adult life.  Her studies focus on under-studied, rural populations while contributing to large multi-center efforts such as the NIH-funded Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Study, which includes over 90,000 participants across the USA.  Her work incorporates high-dimensional analytic tools along with biomarkers and sensors of the exposome, genetic susceptibility and biologic response. These efforts have helped to uncovered adverse cardiometabolic, neurodevelopmental and immune-related pregnancy-child health outcomes as well as carcinogenic effects of drinking water contaminants, food-borne toxicants including in infant first foods, and exposures from woodstoves along with other environmental threats and have led to practice and policy changes. She has served on international consensus panels and committees for the United Nations, World Health Organization, International Agency for Research on Cancer, European Food Safety Authority, US National Institute of Health and National Academies of Science, and Engineering and Medicine among others.