vailsymposium

Shanna H. Swan, Ph.D., is one of the world’s leading environmental and reproductive epidemiologists. She is Professor of Environmental Medicine and Public Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City where she is also a member of the Transdisciplinary Center on Early Environmental Exposures and the Mindich Child Health and Development Institute.

Dr. Swan has worked for more than twenty-five years to understand the threats posed by chemicals to our environment and our health and, when necessary, to develop new paradigms to assess their risks. Of most concern to Swan are the chemicals that our bodies can confuse with their own hormones (the “endocrine disrupting” chemicals). At the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health, Swan is working with a wide range of collaborators–including epidemiologists, biostatisticians, toxicologists, geneticists and systems biologists–to conduct studies and develop methods to evaluate the risks from such chemicals—methods that are sensitive enough to tease out the often subtle health effects of complex mixtures.

Swan and her colleagues have been studying the dramatic decline in sperm count around the world and the impact of environmental chemicals and pharmaceuticals on reproductive tract development and neurodevelopment. Her July 2017 paper “Temporal Trends in Sperm Count: a systematic review and meta-regression analysis” ranked #26 among all referenced scientific papers published in 2017 worldwide.

Swan has published more than 200 scientific papers and myriad book chapters and has been featured in extensive media coverage around the world. Her appearances include ABC News, NBC Nightly News, 60 Minutes, CBS News, PBS, the BBC, PRI Radio, and NPR, as well as in leading magazines and newspapers, ranging from The Washington Post to Bloomberg News to New Scientist.