Lydia Zablotska, MD, PhD, MPA
Dr. Zablotska, MD, PhD, MPA is a Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, where she serves as the Leader of the Occupational and Environmental Epidemiology Area of Concentration. Dr. Zablotska is a physician and epidemiologist with extensive training and publications in radiation epidemiology, biostatistics, and risk modeling. Her research activities have focused primarily on the examination of risks of radiation exposures in various occupational and environmental settings. Dr. Zablotska’s work has clarified our understanding of the effects of occupational radiation exposures on health risks of nuclear power industry workers and workers of the uranium fuel production cycle in various occupational cohorts from the U.S. and Canada.
As a Principal Investigator of the NCI-funded Chernobyl studies she published a number of important publications with tri-national investigative team which showed that exposures to ingested and inhaled radioactive iodines during childhood lead to increased risks of thyroid cancer and other thyroid diseases similar to risks from external radiation. Study findings redefined the emergency protocols for populations working or living around nuclear power plants and opened a new area of inquiry by showing that exposures to radioiodines increase not only the risks of thyroid cancer, but also of benign thyroid tumors such as follicular adenomas. Recently, the research conducted by Dr. Zablotska’s research group showed that the cleanup workers of the Chernobyl nuclear accident are at increased risk of incident chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) and reported possible links with somatic point mutations related to telomere length maintenance.
Dr. Zablotska serves as a Director of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Population Health education in the medical school curriculum at UCSF and has received multiple institutional and national teaching and mentoring awards. She is a founder of the Early Stage Radiation Investigators Workshop conducted in conjunction with biennial meetings of the Conference on Radiation and Health.
Dr. Zablotska's complete profile is available here.