Jeanine M Buchanich

Contributions to Public Health

• I have more than 25 years’ experience in occupational and environmental health epidemiology. I have engaged local communities in projects relating to environmental hazards (e.g., fracking and petrochemical development) and in disparities in life expectancy associated with social, economic, and environmental determinants of health.
• I have served as project coordinator, Co-I and PI of numerous occupational cohort studies, including large studies of workers exposed to glass wool and those employed in jet engine manufacturing plants. I also worked on projects related to workers exposed to chloroprene, formaldehyde, acrylamide, copper smelting, and pharmaceutical manufacturing (Marsh et al., 2019; Marsh et al., 2021).
  • Marsh GM, Buchanich JM, Zimmerman SD, *Graves JL, *Liu Y. Mortality among United States Aerospace Materials Manufacturing Workers. American Journal of Industrial Medicine. 2019; DOI: 10.1002/ajim.22943
  • Marsh GM, *Kruchten A, Buchanich JM. Mortality Patterns among Industrial Workers Exposed to Chloroprene and Other Substances: Extended Follow-up. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. 2021; doi: 10.1097/JOM.0000000000002093.
• I served as MPI of one of the most comprehensive studies conducted regarding the health impacts of unconventional natural gas development activities (i.e., associated with fracking). This Pennsylvania Department of Health-funded three study initiative helped elucidate whether such activities are associated with childhood cancer, respiratory conditions, or adverse birth outcomes.
• I have conducted studies using linked administrative databases and vital statistics data to gain a better understanding of overdose mortality and the opioid epidemic. I have used mortality data to describe local, state, and national mortality trends on overdose and have conducted seminal research in overdose mortality. Our research regarding patterns of overdose mortality has been published in Science (Jalal et al., 2018), and in Nature Medicine (Jalal et al., 2020). 
  • Jalal H, Buchanich JM, Roberts MS, *Balmert LC, Zhang K, Burke DS. Changing dynamics of the drug overdose epidemic in the United States from 1979 through 2016. Science. 2018; DOI: 10.1126/science.aau1184.
  • Jalal H, Buchanich JM, Sinclair DR, Roberts MS, Burke DS. Age and Generational Patterns of Overdose Death Risk. Nature Medicine. 2020; 26: 699-704. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-0855-y.
• I study exposures from occupational and environmental contaminants to understand health outcomes, including mortality and cancer incidence. I served as PI on an assessment of myeloproliferative neoplasms in conjunction with the Pennsylvania Cancer Registry by the Pennsylvania Department of Health and the ATSDR. I have also studied patterns of mortality disparities by race and ethnicity (Woolf et al., 2018) as well as risk of adverse birth outcomes (Stacy et al., 2019), amongst others.
  • Woolf SH, Chapman DA, Buchanich JM, *Bobby KJ, Zimmerman EB, Blackburn SM. Changes in Midlife Death Rates Across Racial and Ethnic Groups in the United States. British Medical Journal. 2018 July.
  • Stacy SL, Buchanich JM, Ma Z, Mair C, Robertson L, Sharma RK, Talbott EO, Yuan J-M. Maternal obesity, birth size, and risk of childhood cancer development. American Journal of Epidemiology. 2019. doi.org/10.1093/aje/kwz118.
• My funded research has enabled me to mentor/employ two dozen high school, undergraduate, and graduate (MS and PhD) students. I have served as academic advisor, thesis advisor, and on thesis/dissertation committees for more than 70 MS and PhD students in and outside of the School of Public Health. I also serve as a mentor to pre-doctoral, post-doctoral, and junior faculty members as part of their R and K awards.
• My commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion is evident both in research and service. I have published analyses of mortality disparities by race and ethnicity, and served as co-I on the Live Longer project. As part of that project, we convened community workshops to analyze root causes of lower life expectancy in Pittsburgh’s minority communities. I am currently the Biostatistics faculty representative to the School of Public Health Inclusion and Diversity Committee, a member of the Inclusion Network, and of the Collaboratory Against Hate.
• I serve on multiple committees at the department, school, and university level and have worked collaboratively with students, staff, faculty, and leadership across all levels. This level of multi-disciplinary engagement and collaboration is critical to developing large, impactful research programs.