Theresa Bastain, PhD, MPH

Biography

Theresa (Tracy) Bastain is an Associate Professor of Clinical Population and Public Health Sciences. Dr. Bastain attended Princeton University for her undergraduate studies and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health for her MPH. Prior to attending Hopkins, she spent two years as a Pre-doctoral Intramural Research Training Award (Pre-IRTA) Fellow in the Child Psychiatry Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health. Dr. Bastain returned to her native California to work with Drs. Frank Gilliland and John Peters at USC as the project administrator of the Children’s Environmental Health Center and Southern California Environmental Health Sciences Center and she later completed her doctoral and postdoctoral studies in Epidemiology at USC.  Dr. Bastain co-directs the Maternal and Developmental Risks from Environmental and Social Stressors (MADRES) Center for Environmental Health Disparities, a P50 Center of Excellence in Environmental Health Disparities supported by NIMHD and NIEHS. The MADRES Center supports three research projects, an administrative core, an investigator development core and a community engagement and dissemination core. A particular emphasis in the MADRES Center is to support and mentor early stage investigators from underrepresented backgrounds from the undergraduate level to junior faculty. Dr. Bastain also co-directs the USC site for the NIH Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program. Dr. Bastain’s research interests include understanding the roles of environmental exposures and psychosocial stress in early life and during critical periods of development on childhood neurolodevelopment, lung growth, asthma, obesity, metabolic outcomes and childhood growth. Dr. Bastain is also interested in the role of environmental exposures during pregnancy and their effects on maternal health outcomes, including depression, metabolic disease and cardiovascular health, during and after pregnancy. The work of the MADRES Center broadly aims to eliminate health disparities.