Faculty Profile
Lydia B. Zablotska, M.D., Ph.D
Assistant Professor, Division of Cancer Epidemiology
UCSF Box 1228
3333 California Street
Laurel Heights, Suite 280
San Francisco, CA 94118-1944
Dr. Zablotska received her MD and did residency training in internal medicine prior to coming to epidemiology. After completing a PhD in Epidemiology at Columbia University, she was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University from 2003 to 2008.
Dr. Zablotska's research activities have focused primarily on the study of the effects of radiation exposures, and on nutritional epidemiology, particularly as it relates to cancer risk. She is currently the principal investigator in a NCI-funded studies of the consequences of the Chornobyl accident in 1986. Two cohort studies of thyroid cancer and other thyroid diseases are being conducted among more than 25,000 exposed as young people to fallout from the accident, where the focus is on the relationship between exposure to radioactive iodines and an increased risk of thyroid cancer and other thyroid diseases. The third study is a case-control study of leukemia in Chornobyl clean-up workers from Ukraine.
Dr. Zablotska has conducted studies of long term health effects in relation to occupational radiation exposures among nuclear power industry workers in the U.S. and Canada, employees of the Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL), uranium miners of the Eldorado Nuclear Ltd. in Canada, and Canadian tuberculosis patients exposed to repeated chest fluoroscopies in the 1930s and 1940s. Most recently, Dr.Zablotska has collaborated on an EPA-funded cohort study investigating carcinogenic effects of arsenic exposure in Bangladesh, analyzing the modifying effects of nutrition on the association between exposure to water arsenic and skin lesions.
In addition to her research activities, Dr. Zablotska is the author of Epiville, an open-access website featuring a set of interactive modules providing training in main epidemiological principles (http://www.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/epiville/).
Principal Research Interests
- Radiation cancer epidemiology; risks of leukemia and lymphoma from occupational and environmental exposures; nutritional epidemiology.
