Brian Leaderer

Brian Leaderer is the Susan Dwight Bliss Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Yale School of Public Health and Professor Emeritus of the Yale School of the Environment. He is also a Senior Research Scientist at the Yale Center for Perinatal, Pediatric and Environmental Epidemiology (the Yale CPPEE, or the “Center”), which he co-directed for eighteen years.  In his role as the Deputy Dean at the Yale School of Public Health for over fourteen years (during which he was also Interim Dean for two years), he oversaw Faculty Affairs including the Appointments and Promotion Committee and Faculty Mentoring Program. He has served on several Committees and Review Panels (NRC, EPA, HEI, etc.). 

Dr. Leaderer’s research interests, resulting in over 300 publications, are interdisciplinary in nature with a focus on assessing exposures (measured and modeled in both environmental chamber and field studies) to air contaminants (indoor and outdoor) and assessing the health impact resulting from those exposures in epidemiological studies. Over the past thirty years, he has been Principal Investigator on numerous research grants (totaling approximately forty million). Several of these grants have been large epidemiologic-based grants (R01s) centered on the role of environmental and genetic factors on the respiratory health of children with particular attention to their role in the development of asthma and asthma severity.  He has collaborated with colleagues from several disciplines at the Yale CPPEE for over 30 years on several epidemiologic studies examining the impact of pollutants on perinatal and pediatric outcomes. With funding from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), he investigated the relationship between exposures to indoor levels of nitrogen dioxide, traffic contaminants, and the exacerbation of asthma in 1,401 children (in the STAR Study).  The findings from this study resulted in another NIH-funded (NIEHS) grant to conduct a double-blind, randomized control, triple cross-over design intervention trial in urban homes of asthmatic children to examine the efficacy of reducing exposure to indoor levels of PM_2.5 and NO₂ on reducing asthma severity.