Faculty Spotlight: Junenette Peters.

Collaborative work is key to developing sustainable public health solutions and improving population health outcomes. This weekly series spotlights one SPH faculty member who advances public health through collaborations within the field and across sectors.

Can you talk about your research interests around the effects of environmental pollutants on cardiovascular disease and cognitive impairment in adults?

My interest in age-related health outcomes took form during my post-doctoral fellowship. This fellowship involved investigating the relationship between exposures to metals, such as lead and cadmium, and cardiovascular disease and cognitive impairment in adults, with a unique twist. I evaluated whether psychosocial stress affected the associations between the metals and cardiovascular disease and cognition.

When I accepted a faculty position at Boston University, Jonathon Levy, now chair of the Environmental Health Department, introduced me to research on aircraft noise exposure. We performed the first national-scale study examining the relationships of aircraft noise with cardiovascular disease. Utilizing administrative data from the Medicare system and noise data for 89 airports, we found significant association between higher aircraft noise exposure and higher cardiovascular hospital admissions. Today, I lead two studies funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) evaluating relationships between aircraft noise exposure and cardiovascular outcomes. 

How is collaborative research integral to your work, and can you discuss one or two collaborations that have been most meaningful to you? 

These two studies I lead on aircraft noise exposure and cardiovascular outcomes, involve collaborations across multiple cohorts and universities.  In the NIH-funded R01 titled “Aircraft Noise Exposure and Cardiovascular Disease,” I collaborate with researchers with relevant expertise within the School of Public Health and from the University of North Carolina and Pennsylvania State University. We link with the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI), an ongoing national, prospective study of over 161,800 postmenopausal women from clinical centers in 24 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.

The FAA-funded study titled “Cardiovascular Disease and Aircraft Noise Exposure” involves collaboration with Harvard/Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH). For this study, we leverage the well-recognized and respected ongoing prospective, companion studies—the Nurses’ Health Studies (NHS) and Health Professionals Follow-Up Study (HPFS). The NHS cohorts are among the largest longitudinal studies on risk factors for major chronic diseases in women. The all-male HPFS is designed to complement the NHS.

Recently, Congress mandated FAA to fund a study of the health and economic impacts of noise from aircraft flights. Our research effort with FAA was amended to respond to this mandate and now involves collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Health (MIT) to perform the economic impact aims.

Together these studies and collaborations with expert and long-standing cohorts allows us to be among the first to investigate the impacts of aircraft noise and cardiovascular outcomes on a national scale in the U.S.

“Professor Peters has assembled and led multidisciplinary teams to model noise patterns across the United States and evaluate the cardiovascular health effects in large cohorts. She brings her own training across multiple academic disciplines and is able to readily synthesize contributions from others, with a style of leadership that brings people together and gets the best out of them.”

Jonathan Levy, chair of the Department of Environmental Health and professor of environmental health