Colleagues: Recently Tenured

Meet your recently tenured colleagues: Bizu Gelaye (NICHD), Rena Jones (NCI), Hendrikje Nienborg (NEI), and Natalie Shaw (NIEHS)

BIZU GELAYE, PH.D., NICHD

Senior Investigator and Chief, Epidemiology Branch, Division of Population Health Research

Education: Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (B.Sc. in mechanical engineering); University of Washington, Seattle (M.P.H. and Ph.D. in epidemiology)

Before coming to NIH: Associate professor of epidemiology and psychiatry at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School, and Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston

Came to NIH: In 2024 as branch chief and senior investigator, NICHD

Outside interests: Spending time with family; reading; watching football and basketball with my son (New England Patriots and Boston Celtics fan!); walking outside; playing tennis

Website: https://irp.nih.gov/pi/bizu-gelaye

Research interests: My lab integrates biological, molecular, environmental, social, and structural factors to understand how preconception and perinatal exposures to adversity lead to short- and long-term maternal and offspring health outcomes across generations. We have three main lines of research.

First, we have shown how trauma and adversity affect maternal health across the lifespan and extend across generations (PMID: 36776635; PMID: 28905129; PMID: 27173085). We are now investigating the epigenetic mechanisms, and how the chronicity and timing of maternal trauma affect children's behavioral health intergenerationally, and whether postnatal maternal caregiving sensitivity can buffer these effects.

Our second line of research focuses on understanding the underlying social, economic, and structural drivers of maternal morbidity and mortality. I am one of the key investigators for a NICHD-funded U54 Maternal Health Research Center of Excellence at Jackson State University (Jackson, Mississippi). The overarching objective of the center is to address preventable maternal mortality, decrease severe maternal morbidity, and promote maternal health equity in partnership with the Mississippi Delta communities.

Lastly, our research incorporates novel biomarkers to understand the mechanistic basis of the risk of adverse maternal and child health outcomes. One example biomarker is hair cortisol concentration. Hair cortisol concentration measures long-term systemic cortisol concentrations, providing an integrated measure of hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis activity, one of the main pathways activated in response to stress (PMID: 36893558; PMID: 36841381). Elucidating such biological and molecular mechanisms may lead to novel prevention and treatment strategies.

RENA JONES, PH.D., NCI

Senior Investigator, Occupational and Environmental Epidemiology Branch, Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics

Education: University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts (B.S. in biology); University at Albany, Albany, New York (M.S. and Ph.D. in epidemiology)

Training: Postdoctoral and research fellow, NCI (2012–2017)

Before coming to NIH: Research scientist, New York State Department of Health, Troy, New York

Came to NIH: In 2012 as a postdoctoral fellow, NCI

Outside interests: Hiking; vegetarian cooking; spending time with family, friends, and pets

Website: https://irp.nih.gov/pi/rena-jones

Research interests: I am an epidemiologist focused on investigating etiologic associations between environmental contaminants and cancer. Fundamental to these studies is high-quality exposure assessment. The development of metrics that adequately reflect human exposure requires understanding exposure pathways, environmental transport and persistence, and exposure determinants, all of which have sources of uncertainty, especially in retrospective studies.

My work leverages Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technologies and novel approaches to assess environmental exposures. I improve long-term exposure estimates by enhancing the spatial accuracy of exposure source locations (PMID: 30302014), characterizing participant mobility and time spent in various microenvironments, and incorporating information from surveys and regulatory monitoring. I also design studies to evaluate the validity and reliability of exposure estimates.

In the Los Angeles Ultrafines Study, I am investigating how ultrafine particles (UFP) emitted from vehicle exhaust may influence risk of lung and other cancers. We applied innovative methods to retrospectively quantify exposure to UFP, an unregulated pollutant, and showed a relationship with risk of lung adenocarcinoma (PMID: 37856832).

My drinking water research involves studying cancer associations with agricultural contaminants and disinfection byproducts. I have developed exposure metrics for these contaminants in public water supplies to investigate their relationships with several cancers. Intriguing findings from the Iowa Women’s Health Study have motivated efforts to apply similar techniques in two additional cohorts—the Agricultural Health Study and the California Teachers Study. I am also advancing research on persistent water contaminants, including per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, and their relation to cancer in both children (PMID: 38092046) and adults (PMID: 37902275).

Future directions: In the future, I hope to probe further into the novel associations we have observed between air pollutants and lung cancer. Given the considerable burden of this disease and because screening is recommended only for high-risk individuals such as smokers, understanding the potential environmental causes is of great interest.

[COMPILED BY SEPPIDEH SAMI, CC]

HENDRIKJE NIENBORG, M.D., PH.D., NEI

Senior Investigator, Visual Decision-Making Section, Laboratory of Sensorimotor Research

Education: University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom (M.Sc. in neuroscience); Ludwig-Maximilian University, Munich, Germany (M.D. and Ph.D. in neurophysiology)

Training: Postdoctoral fellow, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, California (2009–2012); postdoctoral fellow, NEI (2005–2009)

Before coming to NIH: Principal investigator, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

Came to NIH: In 2019 as an investigator, NEI

Outside interests: Hiking; biking; reading with my family; open water swimming; wood sculpture

Website: https://irp.nih.gov/pi/hendrikje-nienborg

Research interests: I am a systems neuroscientist interested in how vision guides behavior in different contexts. Humans interpret visual information to navigate novel environments, adapt to behavioral or cognitive states, and accomplish various tasks. My research aims to uncover how brain processes support flexible visually guided behavior by integrating computational, behavioral, pharmacological, large-scale electrophysiological, and machine learning approaches to address three key research questions:

1. How are cognitive and sensory signals integrated into the visual cortex (PMID: 34294703)?
2. How do nonvisual factors, such as motivation, behavioral state, movement, or learning, involved in neuromodulatory circuits influence incoming visual signal encoding (PMID: 37828227)?
3. How do these combined signals guide behavior in healthy mammalian brains?

Answering these questions will improve our understanding of how these mechanisms fail in psychiatric and neurological diseases.

Future directions: We plan to target peripheral visual field processing, which is critical for interacting with the world but impaired in common forms of vision loss, and it has been understudied mostly due to technical challenges that can now be overcome.

[COMPILED BY CASEY CARGILL, NEI]

NATALIE D. SHAW, M.D., M.M.SC., NIEHS

Senior Investigator, Clinical Research Branch

Education: Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (B.S. in biological sciences); State University of New York at Buffalo School of Medicine, Buffalo, New York (M.D.); Harvard Medical School, Boston (M.M.Sc.)

Training: Intern and resident in pediatrics, Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh (2004–2007); clinical fellow in pediatric endocrinology, Boston Children's Hospital, Boston (2007–2010); research fellow in reproductive endocrinology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston (2010–2015)

Came to NIH: In 2015 as a Lasker Clinical Research Scholar and tenure-track investigator, NIEHS

Outside interests: Sports and fitness; travel; spending time with friends and family

Website: https://irp.nih.gov/pi/natalie-shaw

Research interests: I am a pediatric endocrinologist, clinical and translational investigator, Lasker Clinical Research Scholar, and principal investigator of the Pediatric Neuroendocrinology Group within the Clinical Research Branch at NIEHS. My research program aims to understand the genetic and environmental control of human reproductive development. To this end, I conduct physiological studies in healthy, pubertal participants and translational studies in patients with a rare form of hypogonadism.

My group’s three main research aims are the following:

1. To investigate the contributions of body weight, abnormal sleep patterns, and other environmental (for example, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or microbiome) and lifestyle factors to irregular menstrual cycles in adolescent girls during the first few years after menarche (a girl’s first period). Although irregular menstrual cycles are a common part of female development, a subset of teens never make the critical transition to normal menstrual cycles. By investigating the physiologic and pathophysiologic underpinnings of irregular menstrual cycles in adolescent girls in the one to two years after their first menses, we intend to identify those girls who are at high risk for reproductive dysfunction as adults.
2. To determine the influence of obesity, and genetic and environmental factors (i.e., sleep, activity, or endocrine-disrupting compounds) on pubertal timing and reproductive hormones in boys and girls. We initiated the NIEHS Body Weight and Puberty Study to investigate pubertal development in girls with obesity vs. normal weight using breast ultrasonography, dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (for body composition), hand X-ray (for bone age), transabdominal (pelvic) ultrasounds, and anthropometrics such as height, weight, body-mass index, and waist-hip ratio (PMID: 33630047). Another study is underway that will enroll boys and girls. Through a collaboration with NCATS, we have also identified environmental factors that affect pubertal timing via a high-throughput screen of the Tox21 10K compound library in HEK293 cells and hypothalamic neurons derived from induced pluripotent stem cells (PMID: 39254333).
3. To determine the genetic architecture of Bosma arhinia microphthalmia syndrome, a rare syndromic form of hypogonadism. Patients with Bosma syndrome are born without an external nose (arhinia) and with small or absent eyes (microphthalmia or anophthalmia). They also don’t undergo puberty and are infertile (hypogonadotropic hypogonadism). This condition is extremely rare, with only about 70 cases reported worldwide in the past century. We discovered the genetic cause of Bosma syndrome (mutations in SMCHD1; PMID: 28067909) and are now studying patient-derived cranial placode cells to determine the underlying pathophysiology (PMID: 36800423).

[COMPILED BY HÉCTOR CANCEL ASENCIO, NINDS]