Robert O Wright, MD, MPH

Robert O. Wright, MD, MPH, is a pediatrician, medical toxicologist, and environmental epidemiologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He is the Ethel H. Wise Chair of the Department of Environmental Medicine and Climate Science, Co-Director of the Institute for Climate Change, Environmental Health, and Exposomics, and Principal Investigator of an ongoing longitudinal birth cohort in Mexico City (Programming Research in Obesity, Growth, Environment and Social Stress--PROGRESS) in collaboration with the National Institute of Public Health, Mexico. He also founded the (Metals Assessment Targeting Community Health) MATCH study in Tar Creek, Oklahoma. 

In September 2018, he joined the National Advisory Environmental Health Sciences Council (NAEHSC), a Congressionally mandated body that advises the secretary of Health and Human Services, the director of NIH, and the director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) on matters relating to the direction of research, research support, training, and career development supported by the NIEHS.

Dr. Wright studies chemical mixtures, social stressors as a modifier of chemical toxicity, and the role of genetics/epigenetics in modifying or mediating chemical toxicity. He is an international advocate for research on exposomics—the measure of all health relevant human exposure throughout the lifespan. He has published over 200 research studies and has served on numerous international and national committees and advisory boards. Dr. Wright founded the Senator Frank Lautenberg Laboratory of Environmental Health Sciences at Mount Sinai in 2014 and in 2020 launched the Laboratory for Innovation in Exposomic Precision Medicine. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan Medical School and completed residency in Pediatrics at Northwestern University, as well as the following fellowships: Emergency Medicine, (Brown University), Medical Toxicology (Harvard University), Environmental Epidemiology, (Harvard University) and Genetic Epidemiology (Harvard University). Finally, he also established the Mount Sinai Transdisciplinary Center on Early Environmental Exposures—a NIH funded Core Center grant program that provides infrastructure support to Mount Sinai environmental researchers.