Christine Loftus, PhD, MPH
About
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.
Education
- BS, Chemistry, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA
- MS, Chemistry, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
- MPH, Environmental Health, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
- PhD, Epidemiology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
Affiliations
Mentorship
Available to mentor new Master's students in Autumn 2026. Please follow the instructions on the How To Apply page.
Research
ECHO Yakima Valley: This project is part of the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) program, a nationwide pregnancy cohort of over 60,000 mother-child pairs and a large community of experts in child health and the environment. For ECHO Yakima Valley, our team is recruiting nearly 1,000 pregnancies in the rural Yakima area, adding diversity to the national ECHO cohort as well as a perspective on environmental conditions faced by families living in agricultural, low-resourced settings. In this project, our team is also conducting several studies of children's environmental health within the larger ECHO cohort, and we are leading scientific interest groups on air pollution, wildfire smoke, and rural health to support ECHO science in these areas. Our primary scientific objectives are to leverage the national ECHO cohort to conduct research that is solution-oriented, informing U.S. policy relevant to air pollution and other environmental chemicals.
Engaging community to address barriers to wildfire smoke protection in the Yakima Valley: This pilot project study, funded by the DEOHS EDGE Center, aims to characterize the experiences of families in the Yakima Valley during times of high wildfire smoke. Understanding perceptions of wildfire smoke risks, actions families are currently taking to prevent child exposure to smoke, and barriers to exposure prevention is an important step in designing programs to better support families in the future. We are collaborating with Heritage University, a local university serving the Yakima Valley region, to conduct this research with undergraduate interns. These interns have collected almost 200 surveys, mostly in person, and are contributing to data management and analysis. Heritage students will also produce risk communication materials, such as short videos, for the Yakima Valley community to learn about wildfire smoke. Findings from this study will support future research projects, including a full-scale intervention study of wildfire smoke protection.
Airports, Air Quality and Asthma Study: In this study, we are collaborating with the Public Health - Seattle King County Asthma Program to evaluate the effectiveness of portable air cleaners to improve indoor air quality and airway health for children with asthma residing near the Seattle-Tacoma (Sea-Tac) International Airport. Families living in this area face elevated exposures to air pollution from busy roadways and the airport, likely contributing to elevated asthma hospitalization rates observed in South King County. This is a randomized controlled trial that compares homes that receive a portable air cleaner with HEPA filter to those that receive an air cleaner without a filter. If successful, this research could inform future efforts to assist children with asthma in South King County.
Publications
Selected publications
- Cohort profile: the ECHO prenatal and early childhood pathways to health consortium (ECHO-PATHWAYS)
- Maternal exposure to urinary polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) in pregnancy and childhood asthma in a pooled multi-cohort study
- Associations of Pre- and Postnatal Air Pollution Exposures with Child Behavioral Problems and Cognitive Performance: A U.S. Multi-Cohort Study
- Exposure to prenatal phthalate mixtures and neurodevelopment in the Conditions Affecting Neurocognitive Development and Learning in Early childhood (CANDLE) study
- Longitudinal Changes in Youth Mental Health From Before to During the COVID-19 Pandemic