Megan K Horton, PhD, MPH

Megan Horton, PhD, MPH, is Professor in the Department of Environmental Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her research at Mount Sinai combines state-of-the-art environmental exposure assessment with structural and functional neuroimaging and behavioral phenotyping to understand how early life exposure to developmental neurotoxicants impacts typical brain development and leads to aberrant cognitive and behavioral outcomes in children.  Recently, her research extends to investigate how environmental, social and occupational stressors impact later life health outcomes including PTSD and cognitive impairment.

Dr. Horton’s research has been funded from grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), the New York/New Jersey Educational Research Center (NY/NJERC) and the Honest Company. Her research is highly collaborative and involves several on going studies that are based in New York City, Italy, Mexico.

Dr. Horton earned her doctoral degree in Environmental Health Sciences at Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University. During her doctoral training, she gained expertise in the development and use of biological markers to measure prenatal and early life exposures to environmental toxicants, focusing mainly on residential exposure to pesticides. Subsequently, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Sergievsky Center for the Epidemiologic Study of Neurologic Diseases. The focus of this postdoc was to explore the use of brain imaging (i.e., magnetic resonance imaging – MRI) to investigate the impact of prenatal exposure to pesticides and secondhand smoke on neuropsychological and behavioral function throughout childhood.