About
Anneclaire De Roos is an environmental epidemiologist with extensive experience studying chemical, physical, and biological exposures as risk factors for chronic and acute health outcomes including cancer, asthma, and infectious illnesses. Exposure settings of interest include the workplace (pesticides, solvents) and residential communities (pollution, water contamination). Current projects focus on the nexus between the natural environment and human health – such as risks from extreme weather and potential benefits from urban greenspace.
Dr. De Roos is currently funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) to conduct a large study of the possible influence of greenspace exposure in early life on development of asthma and allergies (R21ES032963). She is examining this topic within a birth cohort assembled using electronic health records from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, including over 200,000 children living in the Philadelphia metropolitan region, with linkage to highly spatiotemporal data by children’s individual geocoded addresses. Several greenspace measures will be examined, including overall vegetation density, tree canopy coverage, grass/shrubs, vegetation diversity, street tree species and spatial patterning of vegetation, and these measures will be examined as time-window specific (e.g., infancy) and cumulative greenspace exposures over follow-up.
In the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel, Dr. De Roos is the primary instructor for “Evidence Evaluation in Environmental Health”, a required course for Drexel PhD students, as well as classes in quantitative risk assessment and epidemiologic methods.
She has served on several expert committees in recent years including those assessing carcinogenicity of current-use pesticides for IARC, drafting NIEHS’s Report on Carcinogens for formaldehyde, and reviewing EPA’s health risk assessment documents for trichloroethylene (TCE) and consumer use of paint stripper products.