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IU Bloomington

Joseph Shaw

O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs

Expert Bio

Joseph R. Shaw, a professor in the top-ranked O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, works with international teams to uncover and dismantle the chemical, biological and social links between pollution and harm to human health. He co-founded the Environment Care Consortium, a collaborative team of over 100 science, legal and public health experts from 13 countries that applies its expertise to confront environmental injustice.

Shaw’s current research couples new high-throughput molecular techniques with evolutionary theory, statistical analysis and bioinformatics to map the specific pathways by which toxic chemicals cause disease. His goal is to use this knowledge to identify and implement strategies for preventing harm to both humans and ecosystems.

Before joining the O’Neill School in 2007, he earned his doctoral degree in from the University of Kentucky and was a post-doctoral fellow at Dartmouth College, where he began to harness emerging technologies to characterize changes in DNA and RNA that occur in response to pollution stress. Shaw was named an Outstanding New Environmental Scientist by the NIEHS in 2010 and recognized as an exceptional talent in the environmental sciences by the Royal Society, U.K., in 2013.

Areas of Expertise

Tracing sources of pollution, understanding how pollution affects human health and the environment, molecular fingerprints of the environment, adapting to pollution stress, adaption to human-altered and changing environments, toxicology, environmental toxicology, mutation.

Other Information

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