For more than 100 years, our Department has advanced the field of Environmental Health through hands-on learning and training, and translates evidence-based on research. We have a vibrant and rich history of guiding public discourse, and national and international leaders, on the most pressing environmental health challenges in the twenty-first-century. To better serve communities’ changing health, we employ innovative strategies and solutions to increase public awareness. Our work in laboratories, field studies, and cohort studies has provided the basis of environmental and occupational health on humans. Members of our Department create and advance our knowledge of harmful exposures and translate their discoveries into actions that ultimately improve people’s health. Our centers, faculty, students, and staff engage in service activities to expand the capacity of communities by training, mentoring, and empowering the next world leaders.
The Department of Environmental Health pursues innovative research and offers interdisciplinary training in environmental health, emphasizing the role of air, water, contaminants in food and consumer products, the built environment, and the workplace as critical determinants of public health. Faculty members study the pathogenesis and prevention of environmentally produced illnesses, injury and disability, ergonomics and safety, climate change, occupational hygiene, environmental management and sustainability, and are leaders in, and facilitators of, scientifically based public health advances. Faculty research areas include a multi-disciplinary approach ranging from molecular and physiologic studies, exposure assessment and control, engineering, epidemiology, risk assessment to policy evaluation.
The department examines complex problems that require the contributions of many specialties. The faculty, research staff, and students reflect the multidisciplinary nature of the field and include chemists, engineers, epidemiologists, practitioners, occupational hygienists, urban planners, climatologists, applied mathematicians, physicians, nurses, physiologists, cell biologists, molecular biologists, and microbiologists.
- Learn more about the Department of Environmental Health
- Learn more about Faculty in the Department of Environmental Health
Faculty Research Areas
Students in the PHS PhD program in Environmental Health are expected to align their research with one of eight faculty research areas:
- Climate and Sustainability: Public Health and the health of our planet are inextricably linked, and they can be mutually beneficial. However, our planet and public health are at risk. Climate change represents one of the most pressing issues of our time, affecting every nation and person. Sustainability is important to address and protect our planet. Faculty research in this area examines climate change, its effects on public health, and ways to mitigate the impacts through sustainability. Related courses explore the effects of energy production and climate change on food, water, air, soil, food systems, e waste, environmental justice, and human health, through the lens of social justice and health equity.
- Environmental Health Bioengineering or Mechanisms of Disease: Faculty research on Environmental Health Bioengineering or Mechanisms of Disease focuses on the biophysical interactions of cells, tissues, and organisms with each other and with environmental exposures and agents, and how these physical processes determine biologic responses in tissue development, repair, and disease. Mechanisms of Disease focuses on understanding the molecular and cellular basis for disease, especially those related to environmental exposures and agents.
- Environmental Health Epidemiology: Research within Environmental Epidemiology focuses on identifying and measuring the influence of physical, chemical, and biological environmental factors on human disease in communities to provide scientific evidence for sound environmental and health policies. Currently all faculty in this area are also affiliate faculty in the Department of Epidemiology.
- Environmental Health Exposures and Risk: Faculty who focus their research on Environmental Health Exposures and Risk seek to emphasize the chemical, physical, microbiological, and engineering aspects of environmental and occupational exposures and the identification and characterization of human and ecological exposures to environmental contaminants, and in modeling their fate and transport, to develop strategies to control environmental hazards, allergens, and pathogens. These faculty researchers also integrated risk and decision science in the context of environmental health — including exposure assessment, epidemiology, and toxicology — built on the principles of decision analysis to support and advance decision-making under uncertainty.
- Environmental Health Molecular Epidemiology: An interdisciplinary subject, faculty in this research area conduct research combining molecular and genetic laboratory assessments with epidemiology to clarify gene-environment interactions, as well as assessment of epigenetic, functional genomic, metabolomic, transcriptomic, and other “omic” technologies into environmental epidemiology study designs.
- Environmental Health Molecular Physiology: Research in Environmental Health Molecular Physiology emphasizes understanding the functional outcomes of environmental and agents’ exposures on cells, tissues and organs, especially as disease manifestations.
- Environmental Health Occupational Health/Occupational Epidemiology: Focusing on the anticipation, identification, evaluation, and quantification of diseases and injuries due to workplace exposures, research in Environmental Health Occupational Health/Occupational Epidemiology to provides the scientific basis for occupational health and safety policies to control occupational hazards/assessing hazardous exposures in the workplace (chemical, physical, biological) in human population studies.
- Environmental Justice: Research on Environmental Justics brings focus to the disparities in environmental exposures and associated health outcomes, considering macro- and micro-level factors that impact communities and strategies for solution-oriented approaches, including discussion of research translation, implementation science, environmental health literacy, and other key topic areas. Faculty research using theoretical frameworks, analytic approaches, and practical applications address sociohistorical processes, stakeholders, and agency that can be learned from and engaged with to improve environmental health inequities.
For additional information about the PhD in Population Health Sciences, please visit: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/phdphs/
How to Apply
Applications are now being accepted for admission in Fall 2025. The application for the PHS PhD 2025 cohort is now open via the Griffin GSAS website only (Note: Not via Harvard Chan/SOPHAS). The deadline to apply is Sunday, 01 December 2024 at 5 p.m. ET – no exceptions. Apply here.
