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Dana Boyd Barr


Research Professor, Faculty
Environmental Health, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University

After a 23-year career with CDC and 5 years as Emory/RSPH adjunct faculty, Dr. Barr accepted a faculty appointment at Emory's Rollins School of Public Health in 2010. She co-directs RSPH's Laboratory for Exposure Assessment and Development in Environmental Research (LEADER; leaderlaboratory.org).  Dr. Barr is the Director of the Analytic Core/Targeted Research Resource of the NIH-funded Human Exposome Research Center: Understanding Lifetime Exposures (HERCULES) and Children's Health Exposure Assessment Resource (CHEAR), respectively.  These centers provide analytic support for a variety of exposome-related environmental health studies. Dr. Barr also directs the Biomarker Core of the Household Air Pollution Invervention Network Trial (HAPIN), a large multi-site international study evaluating the effectiveness of clean-burning gas stoves in reducing household biomass-burning exposures and their resulting health outcomes in India, Peru, Rwanda and Guatemala. She also directs "Project 1: Characterizing Exposures in an Urban Environment (CHERUB)" of Emory's joint SON and RSPH Center for Children's Health, Environment, Microbiome and Metabolome (C-CHEM2) which seeks to understand unique exposures of concern in an SES-diverse African American birth cohort in Atlanta and their relation with microbiota, endogenous metabolic perturbations and neurodevelopment.  Her other research focuses on understanding prenatal exposures and neurodevelopment in a Southeast Asian birth cohort, the SAWASDEE study, in Thailand.  Dr. Barr is a Deputy Editor for Environmental Health Perspectives, Editor Emeritus of the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology and past-president of the International Society of Exposure Science. She was recognized as a Thomas Reuters Top Cited Scientist in Environment/Ecology in 2014, 2015 and 2116 and was listed in Thomson Reuters World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds in 2014.  Dr. Barr's research involves using analytical chemistry to assess exposure to a variety of environmental toxicants, an area called exposure science.  She uses these data to evaluate sources of exposure or risks from exposure with a primary focus on maternal-child health issues.