Our Toxicology Seminar Series, is taking place this Thursday, February 1, from 11:45 am – 1:00 pm in Field Auditorium, Environment Hall, on Duke’s West Campus. During Thursday’s seminar, Dr. Lisa Satterwhite will be speaking about her research with the Latino farmworker communities of eastern NC. Her talk is entitled “Pesticide Exposure and Predictive Genomics: Finding Early Stage Asymptomatic Disease.”
Dr. Satterwhite initiated an ongoing field study in 2010 after learning of severe birth defects among Latina farmworkers. She will share information about the first genomic signature for pesticide exposure that is highly similar to Parkinson’s disease and early results of neurodevelopmental deficits in children and youth who do farmwork. She will end with predictive risk models based on the electronic medical record that can be applied to any diagnosis related to an environmental exposure.
Dr. Satterwhite earned her PhD in molecular cell biology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine where she identified mechanisms that cells use to delay cytokinesis until after chromosome segregation has begun. She studied classical yeast genetics and chromosome segregation in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University as a Damon Runyon Walter Winchell Fellow. Satterwhite joined Duke Biomedical Engineering to study health inequity in Latino migrant farmworkers and agricultural communities of eastern NC, to collaborate with Duke Photonics to create diagnostic optical signatures for sickle cell anemia and cancer, and to teach a class where students do original research towards an early stage pancreatic cancer diagnostic. She and her lab also partner with the NICHES, a children’s environmental health and prevention research center at Duke.
