Project Title: A Community Partnered Approach to Assessing the Impact of Prenatal Pesticide Exposure on Child Respiratory Outcomes in Mexico City
Position: Postdoctoral Fellow
Institution: Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Funding NIH Institute/Center: National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences
Grant ID: K99ES035894
Cecilia S. Alcala was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, to immigrant parents from Haiti and Trinidad and Tobago. At birth, she was diagnosed with Tetralogy of Fallot, which sparked her interest in understanding the origins of disease. Consequently, she earned a B.A. in psychology at the Agnes Scott College and a master’s in public health 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. Environmental Protection Agency fueled her desire for knowledge about environmental exposures, their impact on child health, and the influences of environmental health literacy on exposure risk. She continued her education as a doctoral student at the Tulane University 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. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her research focuses on how chemical and nonchemical stressors affect respiratory disease in children, and the creation and assessment of environmental health literacy to develop effective translation strategies to improve children’s health. Dr. Alcala is determined to become an independent researcher to not only serve the needs of minoritized communities through research but to also mentor trainees in efforts to increase diversity and inclusion in academic medicine and science.