Paloma Beamer

Paloma I. Beamer, Ph.D., is interim Associate Dean for Community Engagement and Professor in the College of Public Health at the University of Arizona. She holds joint appointments as an professor of Chemical & Environmental Engineering and as a research scientist in the Asthma and Airway Disease Research Center. She is the Director of the WEST Environmental Justice Center, a Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Center funded by EPA and DOE. She is the Community Engagement Core Director for the Southwest Environmental Health Sciences Center (NIEHS P30). She is an environmental engineer by training and earned her BS from the University of California Berkeley and her MS and PhD from Stanford University. Her research focuses on understanding how individuals are exposed to environmental contaminants and the health risks of these exposures with a special focus on vulnerable populations, including children, low-wage immigrant workers, Native Americans and those in the US-Mexico Border Region. The ultimate goal of her work is to develop more effective interventions and policies for prevention of avoidable cases of certain diseases such as asthma.

Dr. Beamer has received a Mentored Quantitative Research Award from NIH, a Scientific Technological Achievement Award (Level I) from the US EPA. She has served on the Board of Scientific Counselors for both US EPA and ATSDR. Dr. Beamer is the Past President for the International Society of Exposure Science. She is currently an Associate Editor for Environmental Health Perspectives. She is a lifetime member of the Society for Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) and the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS).