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EH MATTERS FACULTY: Carrie Breton

Carrie Breton, ScD 
Professor of Preventive Medicine, Keck School of Medicine 

Director of the Maternal and Developmental Risks from Environmental and Social Stressors (MADRES) 

Carrie Breton, ScD, is Professor of Preventive Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and is Director of the Maternal And Developmental Risks from Environmental and Social Stressors (MADRES) Center for Environmental Health Disparities. She also co-directs the USC program site for the Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) national NIH program. Dr. Breton’s work addresses the interplay between genetics, epigenetics and susceptibility to environmental exposures such as air pollution and tobacco smoke on health outcomes in children. Her work in the MADRES Center examines whether pre- and postpartum environmental exposures, coupled with exposures to psychosocial and built environment stressors, affect maternal and child cardiometabolic health outcomes, including perturbed infant growth trajectories and increased childhood obesity risk. Her work in ECHO takes a multigenerational life course approach to studying the contribution of the environment to the developmental origins of childhood and emerging adult respiratory and metabolic health. She has conducted several other studies investigating how environmental exposures alter epigenetic profiles in newborns and young children, and what roles those changes play in underlying disease risk.  

Websites: Faculty Profile, Google Scholar, MADRES Center Website

Areas of Research:

EH MATTERS Internship Description: Research interns will have opportunities to work on projects related to the MADRES study and may include broad topics related to study design and cohort implementation, literature reviews and presentations, science communication, as well as more specialized laboratory techniques related to epigenetics for human studies and data analysis. Interns will have the opportunity to join working group meetings and participate in mentoring activities related to their fields of interest as desired. 

Key Publications:

  1. Alderete TL, Song A, Bastain T, Habre R, Toledo-Corral C, Lurmann F, Gilliland FD, Breton CV. Associations Between Prenatal Traffic-Related Air Pollution Exposure with Cord Blood Metabolic Markers and Infant Weight.  Pediatric Obesity. Accepted Aug 20, 2017 DOI:10.1111/ijpo.12248. PMID: 29098799; PMCID: PMC5934325. 
  1.  Howe CG, Eckel SP, Habre R, Gao L, Lurmann FW, Gilliland FD, Breton CV. Association of Prenatal Exposure to Ambient and Traffic-Related Air Pollution with Newborn Thyroid Function: Findings from the Children’s Health Study. JAMA Open Network 2018;1(5):e182172. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2018.2172 PMID: 30646156; PMCID:PMC6324507. 
  1. Howe CG, Briggs C, Cox B, Jungius J, Kvist T, Lent S, Miles HE, Salas Díaz LA, Starling AP, Yousefi P, Ladd-Acosta C, Binder EB, Czamara D, Dabelea D, Ghantous A, Kajantie E, Lahti JMT, Lawlor DA, Pizzi C, Plusquin M, Räikkönen K, Relton CL,  Sharp G, Sunyer J, Vrijheid M, Zhang W, Hivert MF, Breton CV. Maternal Gestational Diabetes and Newborn DNAMethylation: Findings From the Pregnancy and Childhood Epigenetics Consortium. Diabetes Care 2020 Jan; 43(1):98-105. PMID: 31601636. PMCID: PMC6925578. 
  1. Breton CV, Landon R, Kahn L, Bosquet M, Peterson A, Batain T, Braun J, Comstock S, Duarte C, Hipwell A, Ji H, LaSalle J, Miller R, Musci R, Posner J, Schmidt R, Suglia SF, Tung I, Weisenberger D, Zhu Y, Fry. R. Exploring evidence for epigenetic regulation of environmental influences on child health across generations. Communications Biology 2021 June 22 (4) 769.  DOI: 10.1038/s42003-021-02316-6
  1. Bermudez Foley H, Howe CG, Eckel SP, Chavez T, Gevorkian L, Granada Reyes E, Kapanke B, Martinez D, Xue S, Suglia SF, Bastain TM, Marsit C, Breton CV. Extracellular vesicle-enriched miRNA profiles across pregnancy in the MADRES cohort.  PLoS One 2021 May 12:16(5):e0251259. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0251259. eCollection 2021. PMID: 33979365 
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