Dr. Glinda Cooper National Center for Environmental Assessment, US Environmental Protection Agency

Dr. Cooper s an Epidemiologist with the National Center for Environmental Assessment of the US Environmental Protection Agency. Prior to joining the US EPA in 2006, Dr. Cooper was a Senior Investigator in the Epidemiology Branch of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, one of the institutes of the... read moreNational Institutes of Health. She received a doctoral degree from the Department of Epidemiology of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1993, and also has a master's degree in Health Policy and Management from Harvard School of Public Health. A major component of Dr. Cooper's research has been on autoimmune diseases, particularly the prototypical disease, systemic lupus erythematosus. Dr. Cooper is the Principle Investigator of the Carolina Lupus Study, the first population-based case-control study of hormonal and occupational risk factors for lupus conducted in the United States. This study was designed to explore environmental influences and the interaction between specific environmental exposures and susceptibility genes to the etiology of lupus. Dr. Cooper has expanded her research to include other autoimmune diseases such as systemic vasculitis, systemic sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis, and to focus on the pre-clinical phase of disease to further elucidate the role of environmental exposures in the development of autoreactive cells and the progression to clinically overt autoimmune disease.