Worker Health Experts
Tessa Bonney Heading link
Expert on: precarious employment and health, occupational safety and industrial hygiene.
Tessa Bonney’s research focuses on understanding the characteristics of precarious employment, the impacts of precarious employment on health, and the development of multi-level and multi-sectoral interventions to address attributes of precarious employment that adversely impact health. She is particularly interested in the structural features of employment that make it so precarious, such as the availability of employment, the arrangement of a worker’s employment (e.g. standard versus non-standard arrangements) and the conditions in which a worker workers – and the relationships between those features and mental health and substance use.
Susan Buchanan Heading link
Expert on: occupational safety.
Susan Buchanan is an occupational medicine physician and sees patients in the University Health Services clinic at UI Health. She works as a consultant to businesses on occupational issues and teaches in the occupational medicine residency and the division of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences. Her research has evaluated occupational safety and health hazards to day laborers in Chicago. She is the director of the NIOSH-funded Illinois Education and Research Center.
Linda Forst Heading link
Expert on: occupational disease, injury, occupational health and safety, occupational disease, workers’ compensation, low wage workers, work as a determinant of health.
Linda Forst conducts research related to occupational disease prevention—public health surveillance for occupational diseases and injuries, workers compensation, prevention of heavy metal poisoning, and population based work, addressing hazardous working conditions among migrant farmworkers, construction day laborers, and temp labor. She teaches a course on Environment, Toxicology and Disease. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she has been involved with writing guidance documents for protection of workers in jobs deemed as “critical infrastructure.” She serves as the head of the WHO Collaborating Center at UIC.
Jeni Hebert-Beirne Heading link
Expert on: precarious work, right to work, work justice, work as a human right.
Jeni Hebert-Beirne lead the sole research study in the Center for Health Work, the Greater Lawndale Healthy Work Project. The project uses mixed methods in a community health assessment context to triangulate findings across concept mapping processes, interview, focus groups and a community health survey to understand how residents in high hardship neighborhoods experience work and how work impacts the health of the worker, their families and their neighbors. The project has developed an action map on which to overlay interventions to produce an environment that supports “healthy” work.
Susan Kaplan Heading link
Expert on: OSHA regulations, environmental exposure
Susan Kaplan previously developed regulations at the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Her interests include impacts of environmental exposures on workers and communities. For example, she has investigated whether hospitals use already-collected data to evaluate impacts of green initiatives on both worker and patient health and safety.
Naoko Muramatsu Heading link
Expert on: workplace health promotion, direct care workers, work and caregiving, work stress.
Naoko Muramatsu is an expert of workplace health promotion especially in the context of caregiving for older adults. Dr. Muramatsu has integrated her passion for improving service quality with her interest in improving front-line workers’ well-being. She has conducted research on health promotion and health protection among home care workers. Muramatsu has directed a Workplace Health Research Network Collaborating Center for Underserved Workers funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as part of the Illinois Prevention Research Center.
Margaret Sietsema Heading link
Expert on: respiratory protection, workplace exposure analysis, industrial hygiene, occupational safety
Margaret Sietsema’s research focuses on the implementation and use respiratory protection to protect workers. Specifically, she focuses on the control of infectious disease aerosols in healthcare settings advocating for the use of reusable respiratory protective devices in healthcare settings. She is also interested in the use of big data in industrial hygiene applications and the growth of sensor technologies to detect exposures and to protect workers.
Emily Stiehl Heading link
Expert on: organizational behavior in healthcare settings
Emily Stiehl’s research focuses on understanding how low wages impact front-line workers’ behaviors, including turnover, health, prosocial behaviors, and care flow in organizations. Dr. Stiehl teaches Organizational Leadership and Strategic Management in the Master of Healthcare Administration program and has participated in program evaluations and strategic planning initiatives with organizations in Cook County and Research Centers across UIC. She has experience conducting qualitative (e.g., interviews, focus groups) and quantitative (e.g., survey data analyzed with multivariate statistical models) research, primarily in nursing homes and long-term care facilities.
Yuan Shao Heading link
Expert on: exposure assessment of airborne contaminants, mining industry.
Dr. Shao is an industrial hygienist by training with over 10 years research and working experience in the field of occupational and environmental health. His area of expertise is in the measurement of airborne contaminants, occupational exposure assessment, indoor contaminant dispersion modeling, and using statistical models to develop exposure metrics and evaluate the exposure-response relationships in epidemiolocal studies. He is also a certified industrial hygienist (CIH) and a certified safety professional (CSP). In recent years, he has conducting exposure monitoring studies for various worker populations: hairdressers, metal work artists, coal mine workers, construction workers, etc.
Julia Anglen Bauer Heading link
Julia Anglen Bauer’s research centers on addressing fundamental gaps in the understanding of how environmental exposures impact the nervous system across the life course in susceptible populations, including mothers and their infants, adolescents, and workers in global and local settings. She aims to identify susceptibility factors that modify the association between chemical exposures and health, including race and ethnicity, exposure timing, co-exposure conditions, and sex differences. Her work includes using environmental mixtures methods, neural networks and novel biomarkers of exposure, such as deciduous “baby” teeth to estimate retrospective elemental exposures. Dr. Bauer has worked with dental professional populations to evaluate occupational mercury exposure and neurodegenerative disease.