Khandaker Islam, MBBS, PhD

Biography

Talat Islam is an environmental epidemiologist who joined the USC faculty in 2009. He completed his medical education at Dhaka Medical College, Bangladesh and Doctoral degree in Epidemiology at USC. His primary research interest is the contribution of the environmental exposure to diseases and its underlying pathogenesis. A major focus of his research is understanding the effect of environmental exposures on children health outcomes. As a researcher of the Children's Health Study (CHS) of Southern California, he has investigated the effect of air pollution on respiratory health of children (lung function growth and asthma incidence) with possible role of genes and social stressors. He received Fogarty funding (International Research Scholar Development Award) in 2015 to investigate the effects of cook stove smoke exposure on pregnancy outcomes and pneumonia among infants in Bangladesh. As part of the study, he established and followed a pregnancy cohort in Bangladesh from 18 weeks of pregnancy to 12 months after delivery. He is also interested in understanding the effect of environmental factors in the etiology and prognosis of multiple sclerosis (MS). He collaborates with neurologists as USC in MS research. He is also involved in teaching Epidemiology and Environmental Epidemiology at the graduate level at USC.