Danielle is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Radiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Danielle received her PhD in Epidemiology from the Department of Public Health Sciences at the Medical University of South Carolina in 2019. During that time, she received specialized training in clinical and translational research. She completed two NIH postdoctoral fellowships in perinatal/pediatric epidemiology at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and environmental epidemiology at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. She previously received a BS in Health Sciences from Furman University and worked as a research assistant for LiveWell Greenville.

In 2021, Danielle was funded as an ODS Research Scholar for a project examining fatty acids and infant adiposity, respiratory, and atopic outcomes. In 2023, Danielle was awarded a K99/R00 to investigate gestational phthalate and phthalate alternative exposures associated with early life cardiometabolic development.

Danielle aims to conduct rigorous and impactful research on the causes and consequences of adverse health outcomes including cardiometabolic and respiratory disorders. She is particularly interested in pregnancy and early life as a period of increased susceptibility to environmental and nutritional exposures influencing growth, cardiometabolic, and respiratory health across the lifecourse.

Specific areas of research and training include:

• Pregnancy and early life (infancy through adolescence)
  • Fetal and pediatric growth and development
  • Pregnancy physiology
  • Adverse pregnancy outcomes such as gestational diabetes and hypertensive disorders of pregnancy
  • Imaging and biomarker considerations during pregnancy
  • Early indicators and etiology of disease in children
  • Developmental Origins of Health and Disease
  • Women’s and children’s health
• Cardiometabolic, respiratory, and atopic outcomes
  • Imaging, biomarkers, and other indicators of disease or subclinical disease
  • Assessment and analysis of anthropometry, body composition, and anatomy
  • Growth and longitudinal modeling
  • Etiology, prognosis, and comorbidities
  • Health disparities
• Chemical and non-chemical environmental exposures
  • Persistent and nonpersistent chemical exposures found in everyday personal care and consumer products
  • Non-chemical exposures including the built environment, air pollution, and climate change
  • -Omics, mixtures, and complex high-dimensional exposure data
  • Exposure disparities
  • Co-occurence and interactions with nutritional status
  • Exposure assessment and bias
• Nutritional exposures including diet and physical activity
  • Fatty acids such as omega-3s found in seafood, oils, and nuts
  • Degree of food processing
  • Breastfeeding and infant nutrition
  • Collection and analysis of movement data
  • Co-occurence and interactions with the environment
  • Exposure assessment and bias

To ensure a thorough and thoughtful implementation, underlying this research is training in and a focus on:

• Exposure and health disparities
• Community-based participatory research
  • School, clinic, and community-based interventions and evaluations
  • Report-back of environmental exposure results
• Epidemiologic methods
  • Mixtures modeling
  • Causal inference
  • Bias analysis
  • Growth and longitudinal modeling
  • Geospatial analysis