As a young woman, Diana Ceballos spent Saturdays volunteering with impoverished children living in a neighborhood built on top of a garbage dump in her native Medellin, Colombia.
“I could see how sick they were, the skin diseases, the coughing, the deplorable conditions,” Ceballos said. “It was evident to me how the environment plays a huge role in health. But back then, no one talked about how the environment could make you sick.”
That early experience laid the groundwork for Ceballos’s research and teaching career animated by a passion for environmental justice and health equity.
Ceballos is a new assistant professor in the UW Department of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences (DEOHS) whose research identifies environmental factors that cause disease and injury among workers and their families.
She focuses particularly on vulnerable workers from communities of color or those working in small businesses or developing economies that often have the most hazardous jobs. Read more about Senior JPB Fellow Diana Ceballos.