Paloma Beamer

Photo of Paloma Beamer

Paloma Beamer

Professor, Public Health
Professor, Chemical and Environmental Engineering
Professor, American Indian Studies-GIDP
Member of the Graduate Faculty
Professor, BIO5 Institute
Primary Department
Community, Environment & Policy
Department Affiliations
Community, Environment & Policy
BIO5 Institute
Contact
(520) 626-0006
pbeamer@email.arizona.edu

Research Interest

Paloma I. Beamer, Ph.D., joined the College of Public Health in 2007 as an assistant professor in Environmental Health Sciences. The central motivation behind her research is in the development of tools that can help provide more robust exposure and dose estimates and improve the demonstration of a relationship between measured environmental concentrations and resulting health effects, particularly amongst children and underserved populations. Currently Dr. Beamer is using both computer modeling and laboratory techniques in her research. She is currently using GIS techniques to assess the risk of wheezing from exposure to traffic pollutants in early childhood. As an expert in micro-activity patterns she is examining the activity patterns of older children and utilizing them to estimate dust ingestion. Dr. Beamer has built a laboratory to characterize exposure and risk of water-borne contaminants. Currently she is using this laboratory to measure the concentration of tricholoethylene in breastmilk and water contaminants in Nogales. Dr. Beamer is also involved field sampling and exposure modeling projects aimed at understanding children's exposures to pesticides in agricultural communities and metals near hazardous waste sites. Dr. Beamer has served as Academic Councilor on the Board of the International Society of Exposure Science. She has been a long time member of the Society for Hispanic Professional Engineers and the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science. She has received the "Scientific Technological Achievement Award" from US EPA, "Mentored Quantitative Research Development Award" from NIH, and the "40 under 40" Award from the Arizona Daily Star and Tucson Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

Publications

Carr, T. F., Beamer, P. I., Rothers, J., Stern, D. A., Gerald, L. B., Rosales, C. B., Van Horne, Y. O., Pivniouk, O. N., Vercelli, D., Halonen, M., Gameros, M., Martinez, F. D., & Wright, A. L. (2017). Prevalence of Asthma in School Children on the Arizona-Sonora Border. The journal of allergy and clinical immunology. In practice, 5(1), 114-120.e2.
BIO5 Collaborators
Paloma Beamer, Fernando Martinez

Mexican-born children living in the United States have a lower prevalence of asthma than other US children. Although children of Mexican descent near the Arizona (AZ)-Sonora border are genetically similar, differences in environmental exposures might result in differences in asthma prevalence across this region.

Tsou, M., Ozkaynak, H., Beamer, P., Dang, W., Hsi, H., Jiang, C., & Chien, L. (2014). Mouthing activity data for children aged 7 to 35 months in Taiwan. Journal of exposure science & environmental epidemiology.

Young children's mouthing activities thought to be among the most important exposure pathways. Unfortunately, mouthing activity studies have only been conducted in a few countries. In the current study, we used videotaping and computer-based translating method to obtain mouthing activity data for 66 children aged 7-35 months in Taiwan. The median indoor hand-to-mouth and object-to-mouth frequencies were 8.91 and 11.39 contacts/h, respectively. The median indoor hand-to-mouth and object-to-mouth hourly contact durations were 0.34 and 0.46 min/h, respectively. The indoor object-to-mouth activities were significantly and negatively correlated with age. Children aged 12 to

Beamer, P. -., Plotkin, K. R., Gerba, C. P., Sifuentes, L. Y., Koenig, D. W., & Reynolds, K. A. (2015). Modeling of Human Viruses on Hands and Risk of Infection in an Office Workplace using Micro-Activity Data. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene, 12(4), 266-275.
Lothrop, N. Z., Wilkinson, S. T., Verhougstraete, M., Sugeng, A., Loh, M. M., Klimecki, W., & Beamer, P. I. (2015). Home Water Treatment Habits and Effectiveness in a Rural Arizona Community. Water, 7(3), 1217-1231.
BIO5 Collaborators
Paloma Beamer, Walter Klimecki
Beamer, P. -., Sugeng, A. J., Kelly, M. D., Lothrop, N., Klimecki, W. -., Wilkinson, S. T., & Loh, M. M. (2014). Use of dust fall filters as passive samplers for metal concentrations in air for communities near contaminated mine tailings. Environmental Science Processes and Impacts, 16(6), 1157-1536.
BIO5 Collaborators
Paloma Beamer, Walter Klimecki

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