Air Pollution and Brain Diseases (MS)

Paula Mazzer

I was born in Michigan, while my father was finishing a PhD in biology. He was a mycologist, who studied mushrooms. My mother taught middle school life science, too, so I guess I was always destined to be interested in science. As a middle-school student myself, I read Dr. Eugenie Clark's books "Lady with a Spear" and "Lady with the Sharks" about working as a field biologist in the South Pacific and Florida. I was hooked, and was certain I wanted to study fish. I got an undergraduate degree in Biology from the University of Delaware, and went to the University of Miami to study fisheries biology. However, while there, I took a class in toxicology, and discovered that was my greatest passion. The only problem was, there is an awful lot of chemistry in toxicology, and I had avoided chemistry like the plague all through school. So I did the only thing I could, and went and got a PhD in chemistry from Kent State University. My thesis research was on how the metal chromium could cause damage to DNA. Surprisingly, the movie "Erin Brockovich" came out while I was working on my dissertation. Not many chemistry graduate students have a major Hollywood movie released that is about their dissertation research! Then I did post-doctoral work at The Ohio State University, working at their Environmental Molecular Sciences Institute, looking at the aquatic toxicity of "black carbon" a pretty generic term which includes everything from charcoal to particulate air pollution. It was that work which inspired me to study particulate pollution - first in the lungs, and, more recently, in brain cells.