Faculty

Background and Expertise:

Jeanne Mager Stellman is an international authority on occupational health and safety, women's health and veterans' health. She has recently joined the Downstate Medical Center after twenty-seven years at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, where she was Deputy Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management and Director of the General Public Health track for the School.

Dr. Stellman, whose formal training is in physical chemistry, was in the first group of recipients of a five-year National Cancer Institute (NCI) Preventive Oncology Academic Award (1980-1985) and in 1988 was named a Guggenheim Fellow to pursue one of the earliest projects designed to understand the building of translational research between disciplines (toxicology and chemistry). She applied this knowledge when she became Editor-in-Chief of the Encylopaedia of Occupational Health and Safety, published by the International Labor Office (United Nations) in Geneva, Switzerland. Already a standard reference work around the world, the four-volume peer-reviewed Fourth Edition, included more than two thousand authors, editors and reviewers and broke new ground with its coverage of the health hazards of high technology, in addition to its more traditional contents, including organization of work, management and policy, and hundreds of industries, hazards and chemicals.

Dr. Stellman's career has been characterized by a combination of basic research and public health practice. In 1973 she published the first accessible book on occupational health hazards. It sold more than 100,000 copies and was translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. (Work is Dangerous to Your Health, Pantheon.) Seeing the need for occupational health information for women, she wrote the path-breaking book Women's Work, Women's Health (Pantheon 1978), widely used as a textbook, and in 1980 created the Women's Occupational Health Resource Center, WOHRC, which provided services, trained students and published a newsletter for nearly a decade. She developed a core curriculum on reproductive hazards in the workplace and in 1985 was appointed Editor of Women and Health, a peer-reviewed multidisciplinary journal. She served as editor for nineteen years. She carried out early research on the health effects of automated office work.

Dr. Stellman, in collaboration with her epidemiologist husband, Dr. Steven Stellman, has authored many studies of Vietnam Veteran health, including the Columbia University-American Legion Study, for which the Stellmans received the Legion's highest award, its Distinguished Service Medal. It is one of the largest longitudinal studies of veterans. In 1985 the Stellmans were appointed by Judge Jack Weinstein as Exposure Consultants to the Special Master to the Federal District Court for administering the Agent Orange Veteran Payment Program. In 1998, Stellman was awarded a $5 million contract from the National Academy of Sciences to develop a research methodology for assessing exposure to Agent Orange and other military herbicides used in Vietnam. Her work resulted in two laudatory Institute of Medicine studies assessing the utility of the methodology, publication in Nature and elsewhere and a featured exhibit in the Science Museum of London in 2003.

Dr. Stellman is the mother of Andrew and Emma Stellman and the grandmother of Rachel and Lillian Switkes, all enterprising individuals in their own right! She has mentored many masters students, postdocs and chaired doctoral dissertations. She is an avid craftswoman, gardener and cook.

Complete references and link to NCBI abstracts.