Allison Appleton

Allison is a social epidemiologist with training in epigenetics, cardiovascular disease and neurodevelopment.  She received her doctoral degree from the Harvard School of Public Health and completed postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard and also at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth.  She brought her epidemiologic research skills and expertise in evaluating the psychosocial mechanisms linking social inequality to health outcomes to the fellowship. Through collaborative research and mentorship from our Fellowship Program, Allison built skills in community engagement and developed expertise around environmental exposure assessments for metals and air pollution.

As psychosocial stress and exposure to environmental contaminants tend to co-occur among disadvantaged groups, one project Allison launched during her fellowship was a study of prenatal metal exposure and maternal experiences of racial discrimination and stress in relation to infant health among a racially and socioeconomically diverse community in Albany, NY. In particular, she study epigenetic alterations as mechanisms that may help explain how prenatal stress and metal exposures can become biologically embodied and contribute to disparities in child growth and neurodevelopment.