Mandy Goldberg, Ph.D.

Mandy Goldberg, Ph.D., leads the NIEHS Puberty and Cancer Epidemiology Group. The group’s research focuses on the following:

• Understanding the hormonal mechanisms that drive breast maturation in early life.
• Identifying potentially modifiable factors that act through these pathways to influence the timing of puberty and breast cancer risk.

Current research addresses the hypothesis that minipuberty, a transient period of endocrine activity in infancy, is a critical programming period with short- and long-term effects on development, including the timing of pubertal onset. The group studies how dynamic sex steroid concentrations during minipuberty contribute to breast bud growth and other endocrine-sensitive outcomes in infant girls by leveraging repeated biomarker and phenotype data in the Infant Feeding and Early Development (IFED) Study. Additional research addresses how exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals during minipuberty affects infant reproductive development. Goldberg initiated the IFED Puberty Study (IFED-2) — a prospective follow-up of the former IFED participants as they age through the pubertal transition — to determine whether minipuberty sex steroid concentrations are associated with the timing of adolescent puberty. This work aims to provide insights into whether minipuberty is a window of breast cancer susceptibility.

A complementary line of research in the NIEHS Sister Study uses a lifecourse approach to identify potentially modifiable factors associated with increased breast cancer risk, with a focus on hormone-related exposures during windows of susceptibility. Prior work in the cohort has supported that early onset of pubertal breast development (thelarche) is associated with increased breast cancer risk, independent of age at menarche, and that hormone-related factors in early life, including diethylstilbestrol exposure in utero and soy formula in infancy, are associated with early thelarche. Current work focuses on the role of environmental exposures during the puberty and pregnancy windows of susceptibility in breast cancer risk.

Mandy Goldberg earned an M.P.H. from the Hebrew University-Hadassah Braun School of Public Health and Community Medicine in 2011 and a Ph.D. in epidemiology from Columbia University in 2019. She joined the NIEHS Epidemiology Branch in 2019 as an Intramural Research Training Award postdoctoral fellow in the Chronic Disease Epidemiology Group. She was awarded a position in the NIH Independent Research Scholar program in 2023, which provided her the opportunity to establish the Puberty and Cancer Epidemiology Group. She received a 2023 Pathway to Independence Award from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development for her work investigating the potential importance of minipuberty of infancy as a critical period for growth and development in girls.