Corina Lesseur Perez, PhD, MD

Dr. Corina Lesseur is a molecular epidemiologist and serves as Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Medicine and Climate Science and the Department of Pediatrics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She is a member of the Mount Sinai Institute for Exposomic Research, the Center on Health and Environment Across the LifeSpan (HEALS), and the Mindich Child Health and Development Institute.

Dr. Lesseur’s research focuses on understanding how molecular traits shape individual disease susceptibility and responses to environmental exposures. She is particularly interested in placental epi/genomics, maternal and infant metabolic outcomes (birth weight, maternal obesity, and gestational diabetes) and in the effects of environmental exposures in early-life programming. Dr. Lesseur work is supported by an R00 grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development entitled “Integrative analysis of human placental epi/genome in relation to fetal growth” (R00HD097286). In 2020, Dr. Lesseur was awarded the March of Dimes Basil O’Connor Starter Scholar Research Award that funds the project entitled “Characterizing the effects of genetics and gestational diabetes on the placental DNA methylome of Pacific Islanders”.

Dr. Lesseur received her MD at the Central University of Venezuela and a PhD in Molecular and Experimental Medicine from Dartmouth College. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Genetic Epidemiology at the International Agency for Research in Cancer, followed by postdoctoral training in environmental health and molecular epidemiology at the Icahn Mount Sinai.