PROTECT Trainee Stephanie Eick Receives KC Donnelly Externship

Stephanie Eick, PROTECT trainee at the University of Georgia, has been honored with a K.C. Donnelly Externship Award Supplement, which provides funding to Superfund Research Program trainees to expand their research experience at another institution. Eick will spend her externship at the University of California-Berkeley Superfund Research Center in the School of Public Health. There, she will be researching the ways in which socio-economic status and other forms psychosocial stress may act as potential effect modifiers on the relationship between early life and in-utero arsenic exposure as an environmental stress and chronic disease, including cancer, hypertension, and diabetes. The data she will be focusing on during this externship has been collected from an ongoing prospective cohort study in Northern Chile.

Through the PROTECT Center, Eick works under Dr. José Cordero with the Human Subjects and Sampling Core. Eick hopes to use the experience at the University of California-Berkeley to become more successful in her role with PROTECT, stating, “I would really like to get a better understanding of how different environmental stressors, including exposure to SRP chemicals, affect chronic disease. A lot of my current research focuses a lot on psychosocial/environmental stress and pregnancy outcomes, but I don’t have a great understanding of this type of exposure would affect chronic disease despite its growing prevalence. I’m also hoping to gain some new analysis skills that I can apply to my dissertation and other current projects.”