Human-induced climate change is disrupting nature’s calendar, including when plants bloom and the spring season starts, and new research from the University of School of Public Health suggests we’re increasingly paying the price for it in the form of seasonal allergies.

One of the early acts of new U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt was to reverse the 2015 federal ban on chlorpyrifos, a dangerous pesticide proven to harm children and developing fetuses. This reversal—challenged by Maryland and other states—was overruled last summer but a lift on the ban is currently being reconsidered in U.S. appeals court.

When children are exposed to air pollution, it can harm not just their lungs but the development of their brains, too.

Exposure to air pollutants related to combustion, which come primarily from burning fossil fuels, is linked to autism, ADHD, memory deficits and lowered intelligence in children, among other outcomes.

Does the way you breathe influence how likely you are to spread flu or colds? You might be able to help researchers ferret out that answer—and many others about how respiratory illnesses spread—by wearing an activity tracker as you go about your day on campus.

For more than a year, the CATCH the Virus study has been tracking volunteers at the University of Maryland as they get sick, stay well or hover somewhere in between in an effort to figure out what makes us contagious.

Neonicotinoids are the most widely used class of agricultural insecticide in the world, but researchers are increasingly concerned that their residues are contaminating the food supply, potentially leading to harmful developmental and neurological effects for humans.

Since 2019, Allison Breitenother has served as the Natural Resource Planner/Climate Coordinator for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. She received her BS in Environmental Science from the University of Maryland College Park and went on to complete an MPH in Environmental Health from the UMD School of Public Health.

Assistant Professor Devon Payne-Sturges has been awarded a National Institutes of Health (NIH) K01 Career Development Award for a project focused on how combined exposure to environmental and social stressors affects child neurological development. The three-year grant from the NIH National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences totals more than $400,000.

A group of six University of Maryland students, accompanied by Behavioral and Community Health Research Professor Dina Borzekowski and UMD affiliate and master educator Tina Lipscomb, traveled to Sierra Leone in June to continue the work that the UMD Public Health Without Borders group began back in 2014. The ten-day trip was the fourth visit of UMD students to Calaba Town, a community on the Western coast near the country’s capital of Freetown.

The Spring 2018 SPH faculty and staff assembly included plenty of great news about school and department-level accomplishments, and laughter and good cheer during the faculty and staff awards.

Dean Boris Lushniak spoke warmly about this being the culmination of the SPH ten-year anniversary celebration, highlighting the various celebrations that happened over the course of the academic year. He noted that the SPH commencement ceremony, happening this Saturday, May 19th, will mark the end of our anniversary year and the start of our second decade. 

The Gamma Zeta chapter of the Delta Omega Honorary Society in Public Health at the University of Maryland School of Public Health is pleased to announce its 2018 inductees. At the induction ceremony and awards reception on May 14, 2018, Dean Boris Lushniak and Principal Associate Dean Dushanka Kleinman inducted 16 students, seven faculty members, five alumni and one honorary member, Mr. Mark Luckner. The ceremony also recognized student research poster winners from each department of the school.