2017 Children's Environmental Health

Translational Research Conference: New Challenges

Keynote Speakers 

Richard Jackson, MD, MPH is a Professor at the Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles. A pediatrician, he has served in many leadership positions in both environmental health and infectious disease with the California Health Department, including the highest as the State Health Officer. For nine years he was Director of the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health in Atlanta. In October, 2011 he was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.
While in California he was instrumental in conceptualizing laws to reduce risks from pesticides, especially to farm workers and to children. While at CDC he was a national and international leader, including leading the federal effort to “biomonitor” chemical levels in the US population. Dick Jackson co-authored two Island Press Books: Urban Sprawl and Public Health in 2004 and Making Healthy Places in 2011. He is host of a 2012 public television series Designing Healthy Communities which links to the J Wiley & Sons book by the same name. He is an elected honorary member of both the American Institute of Architects and the American Society of Landscape Architects.
 

Joshua Sharfstein, MD oversees the Office of Public Health Practice and Training, the General Preventive Medicine Residency and major practice activities, including collaboration with public health agencies. He is also the inaugural Professor of the Practice in the Department of Health Policy and Management.

Previously, he served as the Secretary of the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Principal Deputy Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Commissioner of Health for Baltimore City, and as health policy advisor for Congressman Henry A. Waxman.

Matthew W. Gillman, MD, SM joined the National Institutes of Health on July 5, 2016 as the director of the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program. Dr. Gillman came to NIH from Harvard Medical School where he was a professor of population medicine and a professor of nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health.

His background is in the fields of epidemiology, pediatrics, and internal medicine. He has extensive experience leading the types of clinical and population-based studies that ECHO comprises, having served as an investigator on several large, high-profile studies.