By Anna Miller
When Melissa Perry looks back on 2011, it will be called “the year of urban living,” she and her family have decided.
Dr. Perry, who calls herself a “rural person at heart,” recently swapped her spacious Massachusetts home — complete with an acre of land, dozens of fruit trees and grape vines and even a bee farm — for a Washington, D.C., apartment to become chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health in GW’s School of Public Health and Health Services.
“It’s a huge transition, but we are having a great time,” says Dr. Perry, whose husband also joined the university staff as a data analyst. “I feel a deep sense of gratitude to be here at a flourishing school of public health just eight blocks from the White House. The university is at a time of making meaningful investments in research, and I am so excited to be a part of it.”
After earning her a master’s in public health and doctoral degree in epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins University, she returned to her home state of Vermont, where she became a university researcher by day and a hobby farmer by night.
“It was interesting because I was living two worlds — one was scientific and academic and the other was the reality of farm life,” she says. “I would read epidemiologic literature about farmers’ increased risk of rare cancers associated with pesticides, and yet my neighbor farmers knew very little about the health risks and viewed pesticides as absolutely necessary to maximize their productivity.”
Dr. Perry quickly realized that education wasn’t enough to prompt behavior change in her fellow farmers. Altering their lifestyle in the name of health, they told her, would require indisputable scientific evidence so Dr. Perry began pursuing just that.
As her investigations of pesticides and their health effects grew deeper, Dr. Perry took her research from the University of Vermont to the Medical College of Wisconsin to the Harvard School of Public Health, where she served on the faculty for the past 13 years. Now at GW's School of Public Health and Health Services, Dr. Perry hopes she can make her biggest impact yet on the land and those who earn their living from it.
“At GW, I hope to integrate further environmental health science into a department that already speaks the language of policy,” she says. “Ultimately, we can translate scientific evidence into policy.”
Dr. Perry’s lab will continue to study both environmental contamination and occupational injury. One project, funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, is evaluating the impact of environmental contaminants on male reproductive function and fertility. The other, funded by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, is measuring the risk factors in lacerations among people working in the pork processing industry.
“In the past, people have perceived cut injuries in the industry as almost inevitable,” Dr. Perry says. "But we are showing that there are modifiable conditions that increase the chance of being injured that we can ultimately change.”
In the near future, she hopes to collaborate with other Medical Center researchers in order to develop inquiries about potential infectious diseases and to explore the intersection of injury, blood and food safety in the meatpacking industry.
As department chair, Dr. Perry plans to launch a pre-doctoral training program that will focus on the health effects of global warming and climate change as well as sustainability enhancement.
“I feel very beholden — almost on a personal level — to do something meaningful in sustainability, global warming and climate change,” she says. “What better opportunity and location than this to invest in training the next generation of experts who don’t just model changes in the climate but who also understand the direct impact of those changes on health?”
Dr. Perry also expects to widen the department’s geographic lens, building collaborations with SPHHS’s Department of Global Health and leveraging her own established partnerships abroad.
“Sustainability, climate change and global warming are some of the most significant environmental problems, and they are global issues. We can respond to them locally, but we really need to be thinking globally in order to be effective and long lasting.”
Dr. Perry plans to bring her passion for the environment and health to the classroom.
“I love teaching,” she says. “It is a privilege and an important part of what we do as educators and academics.”
And for Dr. Perry, teaching extends beyond mentoring students who share her passion. Perhaps the greatest challenges and rewards, she says, come from her mission to energize a generation of students around issues that transcend academic affiliation.
“We are coming to understand that global warming is real, and that the temperature scenarios predict a radical change in our terrain, in the sea level and in the availability of water. So, no matter what you are invested in, what you do now will impact the generations you seek to either produce or influence,” she says. “If you aren’t acting now, who’s going to? It’s that inevitability that I think we all need to take on in a proactive way.”