Cecilia Alcala, PhD

Dr. Cecilia S. Alcala is an Environmental Epidemiologist and Instructor in the Department of Environmental Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her research focuses on prenatal chemical and non- chemical stressors (depression, anxiety, etc.) and their impact on respiratory health outcomes in children. She is also passionate about the creation and assessment of environmental health literacy to develop effective translation strategies to improve children’s health.

Dr. Alcala earned a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology at the Agnes Scott College and a Masters in Public Health degree in Environmental and Occupational Health at the Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health. Her time as an Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health Environmental Health Fellow at the U.S. EPA fueled her desire for knowledge about environmental exposures, their impact on child health and how environmental health literacy influences exposure risk. She continued her education as a doctoral student at the Tulane University Celia Scott Weatherhead School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and was awarded the UJMT Fogarty Global Health Fellowship. As a Fellow, she completed the first baseline assessment of pesticide exposure among pregnant women and environmental literacy assessment pertaining to pesticides in Suriname.

Her funded K99/R00 project aims to determine whether prenatal pesticide exposures, individually and as a mixture, predict child respiratory outcomes. Additionally, she will assess the effectiveness of the report back of study results to women and develop an environmental health literacy scale pertaining to exposure risk and household use of pesticides among women and children in the Programming Research in Obesity, GRowth, Environment, and Social Stressors cohort. This project will be the first study to concurrently address the health impacts of prenatal pesticide mixtures on child lung function and create translational efforts to inform prevention efforts in Mexico City.