Simone Charles

Dr. Charles is a Clinical Associate Professor of Environmental Health Sciences at the University of Michigan, School of Public Health. She also serves as the Associate Chair of the Curriculum Committee. Her research began in exposure science where her work included risk assessment modeling for environmental contaminants in soils, air contaminant exposure assessments in various indoor settings, and tobacco smoke chemical tracer identification and efficacy determination in urban households with asthmatic children. Her work has since transitioned to public health practice and research translation working with academic-community partnerships to address health impacts of environmental hazard exposures on underserved rural and urban communities. Her work has included addressing health disparities around tobacco smoking, lead hazard exposure, migrant farmworker health, minority adolescent health, asthma reduction, and healthy housing. Her practice has informed her contributions to state and local partnerships such as her work with the Georgia Department of Public Health to create a statewide strategic plan to reduce lead exposures through healthy housing and lead exposure prevention strategies. The intersection of curriculum development, environmental health literacy, and workforce development to address health disparities in underserved communities continues to be a major focus of her work. For example, her practice-based adolescent-focused research will lay the groundwork informing a place-based, culturally appropriate, strategy for youth to engage in advancing environmental health, increasing environmental health literacy, and proposing policy suggestions and decision-making in response to environmental justice. It will also provide opportunities to empower youth to take action to educate themselves, their peers and their community on ways to reduce or eliminate risk factors within their control, while actively working to change modifiable environmental risk factors. She was recently invited to serve as the Associate Editor for Environmental Justice journal. She was a 2013 NIH NIMHD Translational Health Disparities scholar and 2012 Health Equity Leadership Institute fellow.