Center for Global Health Seminar

Sarah Rothenberg is an assistant professor of environmental and occupational health in the College of Public Health and Human Sciences at Oregon State University.

She completed her doctoral degree in Environmental Science and Engineering, and MS in Statistics, both at UCLA. For more than a decade, her research has focused on exposure to methylmercury through rice ingestion.

Sarah has been funded twice by the NIEHS to investigate offspring neurodevelopment and prenatal methylmercury exposure in rural China, where rice, not fish, is the primary dietary source of methylmercury. Since 2011, she has returned to China 18 times to oversee the study.

The findings (at 12 and 36 months) suggest that adverse impacts due to prenatal methylmercury exposure may be more ascertainable in a rice-eating population, where confounding and potential effect modification due to omega-3 fatty acids and other nutrients are less prominent.