Directory

Dr. James is an epidemiologist and engineer who specializes in environmental and climate risk factors and health in vulnerable populations. She has experience in leading and conducting community-based research projects including NIEHS funded studies investigating exposure to metals (arsenic and cadmium) and cardiometabolic and kidney diseases. Her research was one of the first to show associations with low-level arsenic exposure (<50 µg/L) with direct relevance to the exposure range of the US population. Dr. James also completed a Faculty Development Investigator Award through the Denver Children’s Environmental Health Center at National Jewish Health investigating the association between air quality and respiratory burden in the San Luis Valley and recently led a CDC funded biomonitoring tracking grant in a pediatric population in the San Luis Valley measuring exposures to 17 metals, pyrethroids, phthalates, and other pesticides through urine and water samples. Dr. James is also the PI for The Attitudes and Behaviors Study a repeated population-based survey of tobacco and marijuana use and other public health issues.

Dr. Newman is a researcher, physician, public health practitioner, and educator. He is a distinguished university professor in the Departments of Environmental & Occupational Health and Epidemiology at the Colorado School of Public Health. He is founding director of both the Center for Health, Work & Environment and the Mountain & Plains Education and Research Center. He co-founded Health Links™, the ColoradoSPH Certificate in Total Worker Health^®, and the University of Colorado Consortium for Climate Change & Health. Dr. Newman is also professor of medicine in the Division of Pulmonary Sciences and Critical Care Medicine at University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. He founded Axion Health, Inc., an occupational health informatics company. Dr. Newman is recognized for his scientific and practical contributions to occupational health and safety, Total Worker Health, immunotoxicology, biomarker development, occupational lung disease prevention and treatment, sarcoidosis, beryllium health effects, chronic kidney disease of unknown cause, health informatics, medical surveillance, and climate change and worker health. He has authored over 200 scientific papers and over 120 books, chapters, and monographs. Dr. Newman consults for government agencies, businesses, labor groups, and community organizations. His favorite life role is as mentor, second only to husband and father. He is irrationally optimistic.

Dr. Courtney Welton-Mitchell is trained as a social psychologist and a mental health clinician. She is a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Environmental & Occupational Health at the Colorado School of Public Health, where she works primarily with the Certificate in Public Health Preparedness and Disaster Response. She is also a research associate with the Natural Hazards Center, Institute for Behavioral Science, University of Colorado, Boulder. She is a current Fulbright Scholar Ambassador (2020-2022) and former Fulbright Scholar (2017-2018). She co-founded the Humanitarian Assistance Applied Research Group at the University of Denver and was the Director from 2014-2018.

Her research focuses on health/public health interventions in disasters and complex humanitarian crises using mixed methods. She has conducted studies on group-based mental health, gender-based violence, and disaster preparedness interventions, including public health messaging campaigns and social norms approaches to attitude and behavioral change. Increasingly, she has turned her attention to understanding psychological and other factors influencing risk communication, perception, and behaviors, including in relation to COVID-19. She is a member of the COVID-19 Risk and Social Policies Working Group, and the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute's Public Health Working Group.