Christine Loftus, PhD, MPH

Christine Loftus is an environmental epidemiologist with over 15 years of research experience in prenatal and early-life exposures to chemical and nonchemical stressors associated with child health trajectories. She also studies the factors that may modify these relationships, such as prenatal nutrition or psychosocial stress. Active areas of research include the intersection between pediatric health disparities, wildfires and climate change, and intervention research. 

She applies community-engaged research methods to develop, test, and evaluate locally relevant interventions for reducing early-life exposure to wildfire smoke. In the Yakima Valley region of Washington state, she collaborates with partners at Heritage University to provide undergraduates with public health training experiences relevant to local environmental health issues. 

Loftus is interested in advanced study design and analytic methods in air pollution epidemiology that facilitate translation of findings to policy, including the U.S. National Ambient Air Quality Standards. Emerging research interests include characterizing relationships between climate change and mental health.

Since 2016, she has served as the scientific director of two multisite research centers funded by the national Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program, ECHO PATHWAYS and ECHO AWARE. In the ECHO Program, she co-leads scientific interest groups on air pollution and wildfire smoke as well as climate change and child health. She is currently the deputy director of curriculum for the Pediatric and Reproductive Environmental Health Scholars (PREHS) K12 training program for junior faculty. 

Prior to her career in public health, she taught general and organic chemistry to undergraduates at Seattle Central College for over 10 years. She also served as a senior epidemiologist and project manager at an environmental consulting firm.