Stefania Papatheodorou, MD, PhD, MSc (she/her/hers)
Biography
Stefania Papatheodorou, M.D., Ph.D., M.Sc. is a trained obstetrician and gynecologist and an associate professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the Rutgers School of Public Health. She received her medical and doctoral degrees from the University of Ioannina in Greece and her M.Sc. degree in epidemiology from the Cyprus International Institute for the Environment and Public Health in association with Harvard School of Public Health. Prior to coming to Rutgers, she was a lecturer in epidemiology at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.
Research Interests
Dr. Papatheodorou research lies on the intersection of climate change, air pollution, pregnancy, and children’s health. She has been the primary investigator on multiple epidemiological studies examining the association between prenatal exposure to climatic factors, air pollutants, and in-utero fetal growth, and has documented the vulnerability of the fetal brain to exposure to high temperatures and air pollutants during pregnancy.
She has also examined associations between climate factors, air pollution, and adverse pregnancy outcomes like stillbirth, preterm birth, gestational diabetes, and pre-eclampsia. Her research utilizes a wide range of administrative data sources, such as electronic health records, birth registries, and claims data. From these sources, she has constructed large-scale pregnancy cohorts linked with high-resolution environmental exposures and uses these big data to provide causal estimates. Dr. Papatheodorou is the principal investigator of a National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences-funded R01 that examines the effects of prenatal and early childhood exposure to climate factors and air pollutants on children’s neurodevelopmental outcomes.