Duke University Integrated Toxicology & Environmental Health Program

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Duke University Integrated Toxicology & Environmental Health Program

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We will let you know about our weekly Seminar Series, Symposia, and other information of interest to the ITEHP Community. Duke University’s Integrated Toxicology and Environmental Health Program (ITEHP) is a pre-doctoral training program which prepares students for research careers in environmental health and toxicology.

10/22/2026

Join us tomorrow, October 23rd, for the next seminar in our fall series!

Natalie Gassman, PhD, University of Alabama at Birmingham, will present “Mapping DNA lesions offers new strategies for understanding genotoxicity and changes in the cellular microenvironment” on Friday, October 23, 12:00-1:00 pm Eastern. Her talk is going to explore the use of a novel DNA damage assessment method to understand DNA damage and repair defects caused by exogenous agents and how persistent DNA damage changes cells and their microenvironment, particularly in the context of cancer.

Friday, October 23, 2026
12:00-1:00 pm Eastern
Field Auditorium, Grainger Hall
Visit the seminar page to learn more & to get a link to the livestream!
https://sites.nicholas.duke.edu/envhealth/fall-2026-seminar-series

10/15/2026

Join us tomorrow, October 16th, for the next seminar in our fall series!

John Rooney, PhD, Senior Technical Expert at Syngenta and ITEHP alum, will present “Omics in Ag Chem: From R&D to Regulatory Application” on Friday, October 16, 12:00-1:00 pm Eastern. Omics technologies are increasingly being used to support product safety assessment in agricultural chemistry development, offering new opportunities to understand biological responses with greater depth, context, and mechanistic resolution. This seminar will explore the role of omics in product safety for agricultural chemicals, beginning with early-stage R&D applications such as compound characterization, mode-of-action exploration, biological profiling, and prioritization of candidates with more favorable safety profiles. The discussion will then move to later-stage development, focusing on the incorporation of omics into short term in vivo study designs to provide mechanistic context for traditional toxicology endpoints, evaluate biological relevance, and support integrated weight-of-evidence conclusions. The final portion of the talk will address how omics data are currently being used in regulatory contexts and how future regulatory applications may evolve as confidence grows in standardized methods, reference datasets, and mechanistic interpretation frameworks.

Friday, October 16, 2026
12:00-1:00 pm Eastern
Field Auditorium, Grainger Hall
Visit the seminar page to learn more & to get a link to the livestream!
https://sites.nicholas.duke.edu/envhealth/fall-2026-seminar-series/

10/06/2026

Join us tomorrow, October 7th, for a special seminar in our fall series, "Climate and Health in Asia: Emerging Challenges and Solutions."

Renzo R. Guinto, MD DrPH, Duke-NUS Medical School, National University of Singapore, will present “Building climate-resilient health systems, advancing planetary health: Experiences and lessons from Southeast Asia.” Climate change is now affecting population health and health systems in Southeast Asia – a region composed of 11 countries once described by The Lancet as a “microcosm of global health.” Today, the region is a major global hotspot for climate disasters, biodiversity loss, rapid urbanization, international and internal migration, infectious disease outbreaks, among others. While these climate-related ecological and societal drivers increase disease burden and overwhelm health services, they also open new opportunities for improving population health equity and building health system resilience. This seminar will present a snapshot of the major challenges faced in Southeast Asia at the nexus of climate change, population health, and health systems, as well as emerging solutions, policy developments, and alternative models that may help reveal the path towards safeguarding our collective planetary health.

Dambadarjaa Davaalkham, MD, PhD, Mongolian National University of Medical Sciences, will present "Environmental Health Issues in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia." This presentation, given by Professor Davaalkham D., Dean of the School of Public Health at MNUMS, examines the main environmental health problems in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, and their implications for public health. It covers climate change, which is warming Mongolia three times faster than the global average, and severe air pollution, estimated to cause 9.7% of all deaths in the city. It also covers heavy metals in drinking water, poor sanitation, and soil contamination from more than 200,000 pit latrines. It then reviews national laws, the updated air quality standard, surveillance systems, and strategies for building workforce and research capacity. It ends with the NIH-funded Mongolian GEOHealth Center (U01/U2R, 2022–2027), a partnership with Duke University and UTMB, and its results so far: 20 fellows trained, graduate students supported, and research papers published.

Wednesday, October 7, 2026
12:00-1:00 pm Eastern
Hanes Auditorium, room 131, Hanes House
Visit the seminar page to RSVP or register for a link to the livestream!
https://sites.nicholas.duke.edu/envhealth/fall-2026-seminar-series/

10/01/2026

Join us tomorrow, October 2nd, for the next seminar in our fall series!

John Wambaugh, PhD, Chemical Insights, will present “How to Think About Risk from “Data Poor” Chemicals” on Friday, October 2, 12:00-1:00 pm Eastern. Most of the chemicals people encounter have never undergone formal safety testing. Traditional testing focuses on pharmaceuticals, food additives, and active ingredients in pesticides. Thousands of other chemicals are used in commerce and detected in the environment and in human blood. For these “data-poor” chemicals, new approach methods (NAMs) can provide initial estimates of risk-relevant properties. Both in silico, structure-based NAMs and in vitro NAMs can generate hazard predictions at scale. Complementary exposure NAMs rely on computational tools calibrated against biomonitoring data to estimate daily chemical intake rates. High-throughput toxicokinetics (HTTK) converts hazard NAM concentrations and doses into equivalent daily intake rates necessary to cause hazard. Comparing these two chemical intakes (hazard and exposure) allows for chemical prioritization based on the ratio of NAM-derived points of departure to estimated exposure intake rates. For data poor chemicals, these methods do not need to be perfectly predictive to be useful. They must be protective and sufficiently accurate to triage tens of thousands of chemicals and identify those most in need of further research.

Friday, October 2, 2026
12:00-1:00 pm Eastern
Field Auditorium, Grainger Hall
Visit the seminar page to learn more & to get a link to the livestream!
https://sites.nicholas.duke.edu/envhealth/fall-2026-seminar-series/

09/24/2026

Join us tomorrow, September 25th, for the next seminar in our fall series!

Andrew Jones, PhD, Duke University, will present “Merging Population Dynamics, Kinetics, and Diffusion to Describe Dynamics of Microbiome-Immune Interactions” on Friday, September 25, 12:00-1:00 pm Eastern. Health state is constantly being defined by dynamic feedback control between self, non-self, external chemical stress, and psychoneurological stress both early in life through immune conditioning and during lifespan through innate and adaptive immune responses. The microbiome is both internally controlled and controlled by the immune system. Internal control of microbiota in the microbiome has been mathematically modeled using generalized Lotka-Volterra models of competition extensively. Mathematically modeling control of the microbiome by the immune system has been recently done for early life on a limited set of microbes and a single immune controller. Mathematically models of the feedback between the immune system and the microbiome largely lumps the entire microbiome into a single pathogenic plant. Here we propose a model of the microbiome control of the immune system using competitive Michaelis-Menten kinetics. The inhibitor concentration is proportional to a linear combination microbial species that have been identified in literature to inhibit specific immune cells. The activator concentration is proportional to a linear combination of microbial species that produce specific cytokines that either kill microbes directly via defensins or increase the nutrient diffusion length. This model was tested on a set of 34 microbial species commonly identified in the microbiome from firmicutes, bacteriodetes, actinobacteria, and proteobacteria. The immune system was defined to consist of a limited set of innate lymphoid cells (ILC1, ILC2, ILC3), macrophages, and Treg cells reducing the overall concentration of specific interleukins.

Friday, September 25, 2026
12:00-1:00 pm Eastern
Field Auditorium, Grainger Hall
Visit the seminar page to learn more & to get a link to the livestream!
https://sites.nicholas.duke.edu/envhealth/fall-2026-seminar-series/

08/24/2026

Applications are open!

Interested in applying to our program? Follow this link to learn more about admission to ITEHP: https://sites.nicholas.duke.edu/envhealth/prospective-students/admission/
Follow this link to access the application through The Graduate School: https://gradschool.duke.edu/admissions/application-instructions/

08/20/2026

On Monday, we welcomed our two incoming ITEHP PhD students, Max Hogshead and Ansley Grider. We are so excited to have you both in our program! Best wishes for a productive first year!

05/18/2026

Congratulations to ITEHP alum, Dr. Stacey Adam, who was presented Duke’s 2026 Centennial Distinguished Alumni Award at the PhD Hooding Ceremony on May 9th. Dr. Adam was advised by ITEHP faculty member, Dr. Chris Counter, and earned her PhD in Pharmacology/Molecular Cancer Biology with a Mammalian Toxicology certificate. She is now the Vice President of Science Partnerships at the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health.

You can listen to a conversation between Dr. Adam and Dr. Counter in the 4th episode of the Duke GradCast: A Conversation with 2026 Distinguished Alum Stacey Adam here: https://gradschool.duke.edu/centennial-home/duke-gradcast/episode-4-conversation-2026-distinguished-alum-stacey-adam/

05/15/2026

On Friday, June 7th, the Nicholas School of the Environment held its 2026 PhD Graduate Student Recognition Ceremony. The ITEHP was proud to see Drs. Christina Bergemann, Ilaria Merutka, and Emily Green recognized for their doctoral research. Their achievements were highlighted by mentors Joel Meyer, PhD (Bergemann) and Nishad Jayasundara, PhD (Merutka and Green).

We are incredibly proud of all they have accomplished and look forward to seeing the impact they will continue to make in the world of science!

Photo credit: Susan Murray

04/24/2026

🎉 Congratulations to Dr. Emily Green! 🎉

On February 12, ITEHP PhD candidate, Emily Green, successfully defended her dissertation—an incredible milestone and the start of an exciting new chapter of her career. We are so proud of you, Dr. Green, and can’t wait to see the impact you’ll make in the field of toxicology!

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Duke University
Durham, NC
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http://sites.nicholas.duke.edu/envhealth/

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