Solaiman Doza, PhD '23
Academic interests
I am interested in environmental/occupational toxicants (e.g. lead, cadmium, arsenic, manganese, pesticides) and associated health disorders among the susceptible communities, especially my home country of Bangladesh. My career goal is to design low-cost interventions to reduce the intensity and frequency of environmental exposures through policy, education and adaptation of healthy practices.
Biography
I have been working as a public health professional for nearly 10 years and conducted several community-based health studies which assessed harmful exposures as well as low-cost interventions to reduce exposure levels. I implemented various epidemiological study designs including case-control and randomized control trials and worked with low-cost exposure assessment techniques. I have worked with various sample types including food, fly, water, latrine sludge, and soil to identify potential exposure routes. I also employed biospecimen (i.e. blood, 24-hour urine samples) assessments, and clinical and anthropometric measurements of the community participants to evaluate their health effects. I am uniquely trained to evaluate both environmental and occupational risk factors as my research varied from assessing food and water contaminations to work-associated health burdens. My research highlighted the challenge of ensuring safe drinking water in salinity-prone coastal areas and the predicament of prioritizing microbial versus inorganic contaminants in the drinking water treatment. My work with the community-level interventions gave me a unique perspective regarding human behavior, health promotion, and safety practices. Few investigators worked on such diverse research studies and I am well-positioned to design robust work-exposure and health assessment studies to evaluate the vulnerable population such as agriculture, forestry, and fishing industry workers.