Faculty Profile - Misti Levy Zamora | Department of Public Health Sciences

My research interests are to investigate how modifiable factors, such as commute mode, exercise habits, or home address, influence personal exposures to ambient and indoor pollutants and the severity of subsequent health effects. Exposures between individuals often exhibit substantial variability since they can be strongly influenced by personal choices. I am chiefly interested in identifying effective ways individuals can reduce their exposure to pollution sources in order to prevent and/or mitigate negative health effects. Knowledge about what choices are most impactful will enable individuals to make lifestyle choices that can meaningfully reduce their exposures. I am currently focusing on traffic-related air pollution (TRAP), which is a complex mixture of particulate and gaseous pollutants that vary spatially and temporally in an urban environment. There is increasing evidence that TRAP inflicts a broad range of deleterious health effects on both health-compromised and healthy individuals. I am also exploring how employing novel low-cost technology can lead to improved exposure estimates to traffic-related air pollution and inform how individuals can make realistic decisions to reduce their personal exposures.

Publications

Background

Links

Zamora, Misti Levy, Jessica Rice, and Kirsten Koehler. "One year evaluation of three low-cost PM2. 5 monitors." Atmospheric Environment 235 (2020): 117615. Patton, Andrew N., Misti Levy-Zamora, Mary Fox, and Kirsten Koehler. "Benzene Exposure and Cancer Risk from Commercial Gasoline Station Fueling Events Using a Novel Self-Sampling Protocol." International journal of environmental research and public health 18, no. 4 (2021): 1872. Wu, Guoyao, Jacob Brown, Misti L. Zamora, Alyssa Miller, M. Carey Satterfield, Cynthia J. Meininger, Chelsie B. Steinhauser et al. "Adverse organogenesis and predisposed long-term metabolic syndrome from prenatal exposure to fine particulate matter." Proceedings of the national academy of sciences 116, no. 24 (2019): 11590-11595. Full Biography here: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=SuN4o8AAAAAJ

Dr. Levy Zamora received her Ph.D. degree from Texas A&M University in Atmospheric Chemistry and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Environmental Health and Engineering. She has a broad background in laboratory, indoor, and ambient air pollution data collection and analysis, with a focus on understanding how exposures impact health. She employs both traditional air monitoring techniques and has helped develop and deploy cutting-edge, low-cost technologies.