The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (Fred Hutch) in Seattle, Washington, recently profiled M.S. GIST alumna Trang VoPham, Ph.D. in the Fred Hutch “In-Focus Fridays” series on September 25, 2020. Dr. VoPham shared her research using geographic information science (GIS) to study the correlation of environmental pollution with cancer.
VoPham is an assistant professor of epidemiology with Fred Hutch and affiliate assistant professor of epidemiology with the University of Washington School of Public Health. Trained as both an epidemiologist and a geospatial scientist, she is a leader in developing environmental exposure models using geospatial methods in epidemiologic studies. She investigates the associations between particulate matter air pollution, dioxin, pesticides, ultraviolet radiation and circadian misalignment and the risk of liver, breast and lung cancers.
In the In-Focus webinar, VoPham talked with Dr. Thomas Lynch, Fred Hutch president and director, about the ways in which geospatial technologies make possible this kind of environmental exposure risk assessment and about the importance of GIS in understanding environmental and cancer epidemiologies.
VoPham received her M.S. in Geographic Information Science and Technology (GIST) from the USC Spatial Sciences Institute in 2014 while she was a Ph.D. student in epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh. Her M.S. GIST thesis "Integrating Landsat and California Pesticide Exposure estimation at aggregated analysis scales: accuracy assessment of rurality" won the 2014 UNIGIST Academic Excellence Prize.
After completing her Ph.D. and M.S. GIST degrees, VoPham was a postdoctoral fellow in cancer epidemiology at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in 2018. She also has a Master of Public Health from the University of Pittsburgh.
