DrJessica Laine

Dr Jessica Laine is a research fellow in the MRC centre for Environment and Health. Jessica's research is focused on improving causal inference in exposome studies. She is currently working on the impacts of environmental toxicants and other risk factors on the internal exposome during early life, using cross-omics methods, and applying causal inference methods to better understand mediators and mechanisms of exposure/disease relationships in the European project EXPOsOMICS. She is also uncovering urban and social determinants of health within both EXPOsOMICS and LIFEPATH, using causal mediation methods.

Dr Laine's research is at the intersection of epidemiology and systems biology, where her interests are broadly in molecular, environmental, and nutritional epidemiology and biostatistics, and in developing computational methods. Her pedagogic motivations are strongly rooted in methods to understand mechanisms via the application of causal inference. She leads a working group and seminar series and journal club (along with other postdoc and PhD students) at Imperial on methods and causality (please contact her if you are interested in participating).

Jessica is the Co-leader for the Global Health BSc course in the School of Public Health, where she teaches epidemiological methods. She is also a postdoc representative for the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. Laine is also passionate about effective science communication and outreach, and women in science. She writes poetry and fiction outside of academic publishing, often inspired by science, as in her published poem on effects of climate change.

She is a review editor on the editorial board of Exposome, part of the journal Frontiers in Public Health.

Prior to joining Imperial College, she was awarded a PhD in Epidemiology from the Gillings School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC). Jessica also worked for five years in a laboratory in Environmental Sciences and Engineering. At UNC, her research was focused on investigating mechanisms of diseases associated with exposure to inorganic arsenic (iAs) during the prenatal period. This work included, investigation of 'omics associated with iAs exposure, nutritional biomarkers that influence iAs metabolism, iAs associated changes in birthweight, and understanding mechanisms using causal inference and mediation analysis. Laine also has a MS in Biology, where she focused in ecotoxicology (assessing metal runoff into streams using analytical chemistry techniques), a graduate certificate in Women's Studies, and a BS in Biology from Appalachian State University.