Theresa Gildner
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Social Science
Where and how people live shapes their health, from childhood growth to the infections that follow a flood. Theresa Gildner's projects link environmental conditions to biological health measures in human communities.
- Fields
Social Science
Public Health & Epidemiology
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
flooding
flood health risk
stormwater
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2030
What they work on
- Build a neighborhood-level dataset linking flood frequency, pathogens in water and soil, resident experiences and gastrointestinal infection rates in flood-prone U.S. communities.
- Use geospatial analyses and Bayesian models to predict how flooding influences infection risk across time and location, and turn the results into an open-access interactive risk map.
- Test how resource access and immune activity trade off against childhood bone growth, measuring bone with quantitative ultrasonometry and immune markers such as C-reactive protein from dried blood spots.
- Relate children's physical activity, measured by accelerometry, and diet, from surveys, to bone growth, height and skinfold measures.
More about the research
One maps how repeated flooding spreads disease-causing microbes in U.S. neighborhoods. The other examines how living conditions affect children's bone growth and immune function.
Why it matters
Residents of U.S. communities with aging stormwater systems could use an open-access risk map to see where flooding raises the risk of gastrointestinal infection, and local officials could use it to weigh mitigation plans. Identifying factors that limit childhood bone growth in low-resource settings could inform public health agencies, which receive the study's findings.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Alexander Bartik
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL·Social Science
Estimate how an extra $1,000 per month changes health-related behaviors and surroundings, such as nutrition, food security, exercise, substance use, sleep and neighborhood, by comparing randomized cash transfer groups.
Samuel Urlacher
Baylor University, TX·Social Science
Measure total energy expenditure in children aged 3–10 using doubly labeled water, a method that tracks harmless isotope-tagged water to calculate daily calorie use.
Claire Ebert
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Social Science
Reconstruct diet and mobility in an early complex society through isotopic analysis of chemical signatures in human skeletal remains.
The school
Washington University in St Louis: 97 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 365 research doctorates a year.
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