Damaskini Valvi, MD, PhD, MPH

Dania Valvi, MD, PhD, MPH, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where she also serves as Vice Chair for Research and Education and Director of Graduate Education in Public Health (since 2025). Additionally, she has been a faculty member in the Department of Environmental Medicine and the Institute for Exposomics Research since 2019, and in Mount Sinai’s Institute for Liver Research (established in 2025). From 2019 to 2025, Dr. Valvi served as the inaugural Director of the Master of Science in Epidemiology program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Dr. Valvi leads an interdisciplinary research program investigating how environmental chemical exposures interact with genetic, lifestyle, and social factors to influence early-life growth and development and the risk of metabolic diseases across the lifespan. Her work has advanced the study of endocrine-disrupting chemicals—PFAS (also known as “forever chemicals”) among others—and their roles in the global epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and chronic liver disease, contributing to public health guidelines in the U.S. and internationally. Her research group is at the forefront of studying the health impacts of the chemical exposome—the full spectrum of environmental chemical exposures over a lifetime—by applying state-of-the-art exposomics and machine learning methods to large-scale population studies worldwide and clinical biobanks, including Mount Sinai’s electronic health record-linked BioMe Biobank. Dr. Valvi has authored or coauthored over 100 peer-reviewed publications, with more than 35,000 citations. She is deeply committed to mentoring the next generation of public health professionals, having trained more than 30 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.

Before joining Mount Sinai, Dr. Valvi was a research scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (2014–2019), where she also completed a postdoctoral fellowship. From 2008 to 2014, she conducted environmental health research at the Centre for Research in Environmental Epidemiology (CREAL, now ISGlobal) in the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park (PRBB), Spain.