Nancy Fiedler, Ph.D.
Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute (EOHSI), Deputy Director
Professor, Rutgers School of Public Health
EOHSI, Clinical Research and Occupational Medicine
(848) 445-6801
Dr. Fiedler is a Professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health and Justice in the School of Public Health and the Deputy Director of the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute. She was a member of the New Brunswick/Piscataway Health Sciences IRB for 23 years and Chair of the IRB for 11 of those 23 years. Dr. Fiedler came to the Rutgers Department of Psychiatry for her internship in Clinical Psychology followed by a post-doctoral fellowship in Community Psychology at St. Clare’s Hospital. She joined the Rutgers Department of Environmental and Community Medicine in 1982 where she developed neurobehavioral methods to evaluate health effects of neurotoxicant exposures.
Through interdisciplinary collaborations, Dr. Fiedler’s research investigates the human health effects of occupational and environmental exposures among adults and children. As the PI of grants funded by NIOSH, DOD, and NIEHS, her research focuses on interactions between complex environmental exposures (e.g., volatile organic compounds) and psychosocial factors (e.g., stress, sex) on symptoms and neurobehavioral function. Identifying demographic, genotypic, or psychosocial environmental factors that mediate human subject responses to xenobiotic exposures is central to her work. Dr. Fiedler in collaboration with Dr. Dana Barr is currently leading a NIEHS funded birth cohort study in Thailand to investigate the effects of organophosphate and pyrethroid insecticide exposure during each trimester of pregnancy, with the goal of defining critical windows of vulnerability that contribute to neurodevelopmental deficits. This unique project applies infant measures of attention, memory, emotion regulation, and inhibitory control to understand how prenatal neurotoxic insecticides affect the neurodevelopmental trajectory in this vulnerable population. Dr. Fiedler has published numerous articles and has served on several NIH study sections including the Fogarty International Research Center.