Khandaker Islam, MBBS, PhD
Assistant Professor of Clinical Population and Public Health Sciences
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.
Publications
Effects of dual use of e-cigarette and cannabis during adolescence on cigarette use in young adulthood.
Tob Control. 2023 May 5;. doi: 10.1136/tc-2022-057542. Epub 2023 May 5. PubMed PMID: 37147126;
Transcriptomic and metabolomic associations with exposures to air pollutants among young adults with childhood asthma history.
Environ Pollut. 2022 Apr 15;299:118903. doi: 10.1016/j.envpol.2022.118903. Epub 2022 Jan 25. PubMed PMID: 35091019; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC8925195.
Secondhand nicotine vaping at home and respiratory symptoms in young adults.
Thorax. 2022 Jul;77(7):663-668. doi: 10.1136/thoraxjnl-2021-217041. Epub 2022 Jan 10. PubMed PMID: 35013000; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC9203939.
Association of Changes in Air Quality With Incident Asthma in Children in California, 1993-2014.
JAMA. 2019 May 21;321(19):1906-1915. doi: 10.1001/jama.2019.5357. PubMed PMID: 31112259; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC6537847.
Native ancestry is associated with optic neuritis and age of onset in hispanics with multiple sclerosis.
Ann Clin Transl Neurol. 2018 Nov;5(11):1362-1371. doi: 10.1002/acn3.646. Epub 2018 Sep 23. PubMed PMID: 30480030; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC6243381.
Courses Taught
- Environmental Health: An Epidemiological Approach
- Principles of Epidemiology
- Health Behavior Statistical Methods