Systems biology of microbes and microbial consortia relevant to energy, the environment and health. *omics and meta*omics for understanding and engineering microbes and microbial communities.
Health promotion and occupational risk factors in commercial fishermen
Addressing occupational exposure to vapors from hazardous waste facilities
Community-based environmental and policy changes to promote health
Professor Cullen's research involves the analysis of environmental risks, decision making in the face of risks which are uncertain or vary across populations, and the application of value of information and distributional techniques.
Primary research interests include occupational health issues among immigrant and minority worker populations with an emphasis on how psychosocial aspects of work (i.e., workplace discrimination, unfair working conditions, work organization, and occupational downgrading) affect physical and mental health, and workplace safety and health hazards encountered by health care workers.
Reduction-oxidation (or redox) chemistry plays a pivotal role in engineered and natural systems. Our research focuses on the investigation of how chemical redox processes can be harnessed to our benefit in engineered applications such as water purification and wastewater reclamation, as well as how various redox processes influence natural systems such as estuarine and fresh surface waters (particularly those under substantial human influence).
Genetic variability of OP susceptibility, biomarkers of OP exposure, development of therapeutics for OP exposures, development of portable surface plasmon resonance (SPR) biosensors for near real time detection of environmental hazards including small molecular weight toxins, protein toxins, viruses, microbes, and spores.
Keywords: Agricultural safety and health, Children's health, Cholinesterase monitoring, Community based participatory action research, Environmental justice, Global occupational health, Occupational and environmental medicine, Pediatric environmental health, Pesticides
Cytochrome P450 enzyme-mediated xenobiotic/drug metabolism, genetically engineered mouse models, utility of pluripotent stem cells in preclinical biology, Pharmacogenomics, 3D microphysiological organ systems
Occupational injury and disease, Developing effective health and safety programs for workers
Develop instrumentation and methods for sampling and quantification of biological and chemical aerosols that would deliver environmental samples to laboratory analysis, microfluidic devices and other detection platforms. This detector agnostic methodology can be interfaced with multiple spectroscopic techniques, analytical chemistry methods and biological assays. The use of the technology will range from in security applications, environmental monitoring to epidemiological studies. This research is in close collaboration with UW DEOHS, the current funding for this research comes from NIEHS, NIBIB and UW Commercialization Gap Funds.
Interaction between particle- surface- flow: application to particle re-suspension from the surfaces, particle transport in the flow, particle collection and analysis. The effort will build on the previous non-contact surface sampling research and is driven by a need for detection of trace amounts of chemical or biological contamination in security, pharmaceutical, food processing industries. The multi-physics sampling approach combines pulsed jet sampling with the electrostatic particle collection. The main difficulty of particle re-suspension is the inability of the jet to penetrate a viscous sub-layer and transfer momentum to particles to overcome adhesion forces.
Novel methods of aerogel synthesis based on the nanoparticle aggregation in inverted flame. The current method for gels production has limited economic viability due to its complexity. The proposed aerosol gel method replaces the complex aerogel process and eliminates the need for extracting a liquid component. Research will focus on controlling aerosol gelation and physiochemical properties of the gels. Numerical modeling of flame chemistry and particle growth will guide experimental investigation of aerosol gel production in several fuel-oxidizer systems. Anticipated results include improved knowledge of fluid dynamics and chemistry for inverted flame synthesis, demonstration of inverted-flame technology for generating high surface structures and biocompatible materials with novel surface properties.
Environmental Endocrine Disruptors, Pediatric Environmental Health, Reproductive Toxicology, Birth defects
My research interests focus on in utero and early life exposures to endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDC) and their impact on child reproductive development.