Robert Wright
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY·Public Health & Epidemiology
Air pollution, stress, diet, and other environmental exposures shape health from before birth through old age. They often act together and through several biological routes at once.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Mathematics & Statistics
- Topics
environmental health
exposomics
exposome
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through May 2028
What they work on
- Test whether perinatal air pollution and stress alter brain development in ways that change eating behavior and lead to obesity at ages 13–17, using the PROGRESS mother–child cohort in Mexico City.
- Define susceptibility windows, the periods when exposure matters most, for obesity by combining prospective measures of perinatal stress and air pollution with new statistical approaches.
- Examine how negative affect (depression and anxiety) and inhibitory control link early exposures to adolescent obesity, including sex-specific differences, in a population with high ultra-processed food intake.
- Support environmental health research through shared cores for biomarkers and biospecimens, biostatistics and exposomics data methods, and clinical phenotyping of stress and nutrition.
More about the research
The work under these grants asks how such exposures, especially early in life, drive chronic diseases later on. It combines a center that supports environmental health research across Mount Sinai with a long-running study of children in Mexico City.
Why it matters
Child obesity and learning disabilities are rising in the United States and Mexico, where air pollution, stress, and ultra-processed foods are common. Identifying sensitive exposure windows and sex-specific pathways could point to interventions for children at higher risk. The center's work aims to turn environmental health findings into evidence-based prevention and treatment strategies.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Zhongzheng Niu
University at Buffalo, NY·Public Health & Epidemiology
Test whether higher birth weight, faster BMI growth across childhood and early obesity shorten telomere length and speed its loss from birth to age 24, using birth records, yearly growth data and stored samples from the Southern California Children's Health Study.
Stephanie Lovinsky-Desir
Columbia University, NY·Medicine & Clinical Research
Establish how dysanapsis, a mismatch between airway size and lung size, measured early in life relates to lung function trajectories through childhood and to dysanapsis at late adolescence, using 8 birth cohorts, spirometry and lung MRI.
Shruthi Mahalingaiah
Harvard University, MA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Determine whether air pollution exposure during gestation, childhood before menarche (the first period), or adulthood confers the greatest risk of disrupted menstrual cycle characteristics and PCOS.
The school
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai: 45 labs on PI Pages, $1.0B a year on research, 62 research doctorates a year.
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