Scott Venners

Assistant Professor

Biography: 

After completing his bachelor’s degree, Scott joined the United States Peace Corps and taught physics in a public high school in Liberia, West Africa.  Later, he moved to Taiwan for five years where he taught English, mathematics and computer science.  He then obtained a Master’s of Public Health from Tulane University in the Department of International Health and Development with a concentration in quantitative epidemiology and biostatistics.  Scott received fellowship support to pursue his Ph.D. from the Tulane/Xavier Center for Bioenvironmental Research and collaborated with the Harvard School of Public Health for his dissertation research, which utilized quantitative epidemiological methods to investigate the effects of indoor and outdoor air pollution in China on respiratory health and rates of daily mortality. 

Scott did post-doctoral research for four years at the Harvard School of Public Health.  His research utilized molecular epidemiological methods to study environmental endocrine disruptors and human reproduction.  During these four years, he was the executive director of a large, prospective study that was funded by the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to investigate the effects of pesticide exposures on fertility and pregnancies of young couples living in agricultural communities in China.  While a post-doc, Scott won a four-year K01 grant from the US National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences to investigate genetic susceptibilities to the effects of pesticides in the Chinese cohort (gene-environment interactions).  In 2005, Scott was appointed as Research Assistant Professor in the Center for Population Genetics in the Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, School of Public Health.  He joined the Simon Fraser Faculty of Health Sciences as an Assistant Professor in 2008.

Research Interests: 

Scott is interested in the application of biomonitoring and molecular epidemiology in environmental population and public health policy research.  Biomonitoring is the assessment of human exposures to environmental chemicals by measuring them (or their breakdown products) directly in human specimens such as blood or urine.  Molecular epidemiology involves using quantitative methods to establish exposure-response relationships between biomonitoring results and health or disease in human populations.

Beyond this, he wants to combine both social-level and genetic factors into research on how environmental chemicals affect human health.  Social-level and genetic factors are similar in that they can both directly influence health as well as modify the susceptibility of individuals and populations to negative influences, including exposures to chemicals.
 
Within the above framework, Scott is particularly interested in common, low-level chemical exposures in the general population and their influences on the reproductive system.  An important class of chemicals within this context includes hormonally active agents, sometimes referred to as endocrine disruptors, to which people can be exposed ubiquitously at low levels through food, water and consumer products.
 
Finally, Scott is interested in studying low-level exposures to chemicals in the womb and early childhood and their effects on development and later health and disease.  Early life is a period when humans might be particularly susceptible to chemical exposures, which could perturb developmental processes leading to persistent changes that influence health and disease later in life.

Publications and Activities