Charleen D Adams
Research Fellows

Charleen D Adams

Research Fellow

Environmental Health

cdadams@hsph.harvard.edu


Overview

I left Seattle for a master’s in public health (MPH) at Johns Hopkins. Afterwards, I did a yearlong fellowship in the Clinical Genetics Branch of the National Cancer Institute, studying cancer-predisposition syndromes, before my PhD in public-health genetics at the University of Washington.
 
My dissertation had two parts: one empirical and one philosophical. I did the empirical half at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in the epigenetics of shift work. I did the philosophical half on the ethical landscape of working at night. The dissertation products were published in three different scholarly genres: an epigenetics journal, an ethics journal, and Nature.
 
Then I moved to England to learn Mendelian randomization, a cutting-edge, causal-inference technique that uses genetics to study the environment, everything that isn’t genetic. Mendelian randomization mimics a randomized-controlled trial and avoids most sources of environmental confounding.

BA, 2000, Speech pathology & audiology
Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ

MA-TESL, 2002, Applied linguistics
Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ

MPH, 2012, Genetic epidemiology
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD

Predoc, 2013, Clinical genetics
National Cancer Institute, Division of Cancer Epidemiology & Genetics, Rockville, MD

PhD, 2016, Public-health genetics (epigenetics & bioethics)
University of Washington & Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA

Postdoc, 2018, Mendelian randomization
University of Bristol, Integrative Epidemiology Unit, Bristol, England

Postdoc, 2020, Cancer bioinformatics
City of Hope Cancer Center, Los Angeles, CA

Postdoc, Current, Machine learning
Harvard University, Boston, MA


Bibliography

Maternal anxiety during pregnancy and newborn epigenome-wide DNA methylation.

Sammallahti S, Cortes Hidalgo AP, Tuominen S, Malmberg A, Mulder RH, Brunst KJ, Alemany S, McBride NS, Yousefi P, Heiss JA, McRae N, Page CM, Jin J, Pesce G, Caramaschi D, Rifas-Shiman SL, Koen N, Adams CD, Magnus MC, Baïz N, Ratanatharathorn A, Czamara D, Håberg SE, Colicino E, Baccarelli AA, Cardenas A, DeMeo DL, Lawlor DA, Relton CL, Felix JF, van IJzendoorn MH, Bakermans-Kranenburg MJ, Kajantie E, Räikkönen K, Sunyer J, Sharp GC, Houtepen LC, Nohr EA, Sørensen TIA, Téllez-Rojo MM, Wright RO, Annesi-Maesano I, Wright J, Hivert MF, Wright RJ, Zar HJ, Stein DJ, London SJ, Cecil CAM, Tiemeier H, Lahti J.

Mol Psychiatry. 2021 06. 26(6):1832-1845. PMID: 33414500