Seung-Hyun Cho

Seung-Hyun Cho leads interdisciplinary studies to assess the links between air pollution exposures and adverse health outcomes. Her work involves an integrated analysis of air pollution sources, emissions, factors influencing a person’s exposure, and inhaled dose. She studies air pollution from conventionally investigated pollutants, such as traffic emissions, coal-fly ash, wood smoke, and house dust, and emerging contaminants, such as e-cigarette emissions, in epidemiologic settings in the United States and internationally using animal and cellular models.

Dr. Cho is currently co-leading a citizen science effort in which individuals will use low-cost sensors to measure air quality in their communities. Funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, this project will generate data on air pollution and help develop a framework for citizen science studies. She is involved in several other studies of the health effects of exposures among different populations, including children with asthma in rural eastern North Carolina, asthmatic children in inner-city Denver, pregnant women, and cyclists in New York City. She also leads the toxicology portion of our Grand Challenge project on e-cigarettes.

As a member of the Air Quality and Exposure team, she brings knowledge of physicochemical and toxicological aerosol assessment methods and expertise in statistical analysis to our multidisciplinary research. Her goal is to promote environmental health by improving our understanding of environmental agents that cause adverse health outcomes, and to communicate the risks of these outcomes.

Dr. Cho joined RTI in 2010. Previously, she completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at the EPA. She has experience in both South Korea and the United States, and is a member of the International Society of Exposure Science.