Headed by Dr. Rolf Halden, the Center for Environmental Health Engineering (EHE) at Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute conducts research to detect and eliminate chemical and biological threats. Monitoring biomarkers excreted by populations to measure population health and consumption patterns has many benefits without compromising individual security and identity. While exposure analysis is a major portion of the group’s research, folks at EHE have developed the Human Health Observatory, a comprehensive community, state, national, and worldwide resource to advance public health and sustainability.

Having joined EHE on August, 2019, my focus has been on studying material toxicity and the effects of exposure to certain substances on humans. Motivated by Health Product Declaration’s (HPDC) goal of facilitating material transparency, I decided to keep the focus of my dissertation around building materials. During my doctoral research, I have worked with carcinogenic chemicals like formaldehyde and vinyl chloride, endocrine disruptors like phthalates in a bid to study their use in commonly used building materials, the possibility of they being released into the indoor environment and subsequent human exposure and finally developing strategies to study and mitigate the said human exposure. The details of the various projects can be found at the links mentioned below.

During my time at EHE, I also worked for One Water One Health (OWOH) where I assisted with the ongoing COVID response and helped process wastewater samples for various projects. As the urban metabolism expert, my aim was to study the effects of the long-term use of affordable building materials in low income communities. Through our COVID response, we discovered several major findings, along with the interdependency of immunocompromised populations and long-term exposure to emissions from affordable housing products.