Theresa (Tracy) Bastain, PhD, MPH

Assistant Professor of Clinical Preventive Medicine Core Courses

Dr. Bastain is a Southern California native and attended Princeton University for her undergraduate studies and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health for her MPH. Prior to attending Hopkins, she spent two years as a Pre-doctoral Intramural Research Training Award (Pre-IRTA) Fellow in the Child Psychiatry Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health. Dr. Bastain returned to Los Angeles to work with Drs. Frank Gilliland and John Peters as the project administrator of the Children’s Environmental Health Center and Southern California Environmental Health Sciences Center—roles she still maintains today. She completed her doctoral and postdoctoral studies in Epidemiology at USC and is currently Assistant Professor of Clinical Preventive Medicine.

Dr. Bastain’s research interests include understanding the role of environmental exposures in early life and during critical periods of development on lung growth, neurological development, asthma, obesity and metabolic outcomes and childhood growth trajectories. Current projects involve large-scale population studies in children and adolescents from the more than 20-year Southern California Children’s Health Study as well as a new cohort of pregnant women and infants in the MADRES Center for Environmental Health Disparities. The latter project is focused on examining whether high environmental exposures, coupled with exposures to psychosocial and built environment stressors, lead to excessive gestational weight gain and postpartum weight retention in women and to perturbed infant growth trajectories and increased childhood obesity risk in a low-income minority population in Los Angeles.