Anneclaire J De Roos
Drexel University, PA·Public Health & Epidemiology
What is in the tap water, and what is in the weather, can both shape who gets sick and how badly. Two large population studies here link environmental measurements to health records and survey data for millions of people in the United States, asking whether chemicals that slip through drinking-water regulation raise cancer death rates, and whether heat and heavy rain send children to the doctor or leave lasting conditions behind.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Earth & Environmental Science
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
drinking water contaminants
unregulated contaminants
1,4-dioxane
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2028
What they work on
- Estimate associations between unregulated drinking-water contaminants such as 1,4-dioxane, PFAS, cobalt, chromium-6 and chlorate and cause-specific cancer mortality by linking federal water-system monitoring data to over three million adults in the Census Bureau's MDAC cohort.
- Evaluate drinking-water contaminants as mixtures, not only individually, to estimate the combined contribution of co-occurring chemicals in public water systems to cancer mortality risk from 2008 to 2019.
- Estimate how hot temperatures, heatwaves, heavy rainfall and intense rainstorms relate to acute pediatric events including dehydration, asthma exacerbation, respiratory infections, gastroenteritis, injuries and acute mental health care, using PEDSnet records for over 12 million children.
- Test whether cumulative, repeated extreme weather exposure predicts onset and persistence of chronic childhood conditions such as asthma, allergic rhinitis, mental health disorders and overweight/obesity.
- Quantify disproportionate weather-related health impacts across children using census-tract measures of neighborhood social and infrastructural vulnerability.
More about the research
Both rely on the same basic strategy: join detailed geographic environmental data to individual-level health outcomes at a scale large enough to detect modest risks and to show who bears them unequally.
Why it matters
Known and suspected carcinogens turn up regularly in U.S. public water systems without enforceable limits; tying measured levels to cancer death rates in a nationally representative cohort could supply the evidence regulators need to set standards. In parallel, documenting which childhood illnesses follow heatwaves and rainstorms, and which neighborhoods bear the most harm, could guide policies that protect children from worsening climate extremes and address health inequities.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Brian Reich
North Carolina State University, NC·Mathematics & Statistics
Develop spatial causal inference methods that correct for preferential sampling, where water-testing and monitoring locations are chosen non-randomly, so PFAS exposure effects are not biased by where measurements were taken.
Arnab Ghosh
Weill Medical College of Cornell University, NY·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Test whether extreme heat events raise county-level COVID-19 risk nationwide, combining Johns Hopkins case data, census data and National Weather Service records from 2020–2022 in spatiotemporal models with quasi-experimental designs.
Bruce Alexander
University of Minnesota, MN·Public Health & Epidemiology
Build regional capacity for climate and health research by linking multidisciplinary expertise and institutional partnerships to questions that align with the stated priorities of American Indian and rural communities in the Upper Midwest.
The school
Drexel University: 11 labs on PI Pages, $170M a year on research, 282 research doctorates a year.
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