When Exposure Meets Development: Early-Life Environmental Exposures and Respiratory Health

This EOPH webinar will bring together complementary population and human-relevant experimental perspectives to examine how early-life environmental exposures shape lung development and life-course respiratory health. Shohreh F. Farzan, PhD, University of Southern California, will discuss community-based research on real-world environmental exposures in the Salton Sea/Imperial Valley and respiratory health in children, highlighting vulnerable populations and critical windows of susceptibility. Jason R. Spence, PhD, University of Michigan, will discuss human developmental biology and pluripotent stem cell-derived organoid models as emerging tools for understanding developmental mechanisms and human susceptibility. The presentations will be followed by an integrated moderated discussion featuring the two speakers, as well as Katherine Wajda, MD, a pulmonologist at University Hospitals in Cleveland, and Xin Hu, PhD, an environmental toxicologist at Emory University. The discussion will bridge clinical translation, exposure science, developmental biology, and respiratory health, with a focus on how population studies and human-relevant models can work together to move from environmental exposure to mechanism, prediction, and prevention.