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Barbara A. Cohn, PhD
Principle Investigator
Barbara Cohn is the Director of the Child Health and Development Studies. Dr. Cohn is an ardent supporter of public university education. Professionally, Dr. Cohn has been studying the early life determinants of women's and men's health across the lifespan. She has studied environmental predictors of fertility and cancer, the relationship of pregnancy to health across the life-span including cardiovascular disease and cancer. Dr. Cohn is passionate about the link between sound research and strategies to improve public health. Dr. Cohn has dedicated her scientific career to producing needed information for development of better policies and programs, believing that good intentions are insufficient to bring about meaningful improvements to health. Ironically, Dr. Cohn's husband of 30 years, a professor at UC Berkeley, died of lymphoma four years ago following three years of severe illness and treatment. Now a widow touched by cancer, Dr. Cohn is even more strongly committed to make a difference by identifying options for cancer prevention starting now. She has three grown children, two who are also CAL Bears and one a UC Davis Aggie. In her spare time, Dr. Cohn loves to be outdoors, hiking with her three dogs Jake, Bandit, and Camilu. All the dogs help her at the office.
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Piera Cirillo, MPH
Senior Research Scientist
Piera Cirillo is a Senior Research Scientist with the Child Health and Development Studies. She has worked with the study for over 20 years and has played an integral role in the conception, planning and implementation of the Three Generations Study. Piera was a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal and later worked at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies isolating steroid receptors for the glucocorticoid hormones before getting her Masters in Public Health in Epidemiology. She is interested in continuing and contributing to the priceless legacy of Dr. Yerushalmy, who began the study in 1958. She believes that the CHDS mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters have a remarkable story to tell. Theirs is a story that provides clues about what behavior and what exposures might be linked to health. It will inform scientists about possible new treatments and methods of disease prevention. She is excited about re-connecting with the adult sons and daughters and their children in new studies that are currently in progress. The CHDS children's children will provide the opportunity to gain insight about the intergenerational transmission of disease and about the interaction between genes and environment. Piera enjoys running with her border collie, Tucker and cooking, eating and spending time with her family.
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Megan Lee, SM
Program Manager
Megan joined the CHDS team in March 2010. Megan is a recent transplant to the Bay area from New England and brings her experience as a research assistant for several different Boston-area cohort studies to the 3Gs study, including another large pregnancy cohort and a twenty-year study on kidney disease and diabetes. She has a Bachelor's degree in Nutrition from the University of New Hampshire and a Master's degree in Maternal and Child Health from Harvard School of Public Health. When not working, Megan spends her free time riding her bike, reading, writing about science, cooking and occasionally missing the snow in New England.
Lauren Zimmermann, MPH
Research Associate
Lauren Zimmermann earned a BA in Anthropology from UC Berkeley in 2004 and an MPH in Epidemiology and Biostatistics from San Diego State University in 2008. Lauren worked with the Department of Defense Millennium Cohort before coming to work with the 3Gs Study. Lauren knits in all of her spare time and also enjoys reading, gardening and bicycling.
Nickilou Krigbaum, MPH
Research Associate
Nickilou Krigbaum joined the CHDS in March 2010. Before joining the CHDS team she worked in various environmental fields from influencing policy to stream ecology. She has a B.S. in Biological Sciences and a Masters of Public Health from the University of California, Davis. She loves the outdoors and has spent much of the past few years wandering about the Eastern Sierras for recreation and research. When she is not fending off mountain lions in the Sierras, Nickilou enjoys climbing, hanging out with her geriatric toothless cat, and reading. Being a UCD Aggie alumnus, it is no surprise she is fascinated by cows and likes riding her bicycle.
Jessica Bielenberg
Research Assistant
Jessica joined the Child Health and Development Studies as a Research Assistant in the summer of 2011. During her undergrad years she worked in an ecology lab and on several organic farms while earning her BA in Anthropology from the University of Georgia. She soon realized her interests lay at the intersection of these fields and promptly moved out West after graduating in 2010, both to pursue her growing interest in public health and for a change of pace. In her free time she enjoys doing most anything outdoors, reading books about infectious diseases, and eating copious amounts of dim sum.
Carol Alliger
CHDS Program Administrator
Carol has more than 20 years of experience in grants and contracts management, including her experience as the Manager of Grants and Contracts at the Public Health Institute. She has a BA in Economics from California State University, Hayward. Carol is a master gardener and tutors at the Lafayette School Mentoring Program in Oakland. She enjoys knitting, hiking, traveling and spending time with her family. She and her husband Frank have been married for 39 years and have two grown children that live close by.
Marj Plumb, DrPH, MNA
Consultant to 3Gs
Marj Plumb is a non-profit consultant, trainer, and facilitator who specializes in public policy, community-based participatory research, and organizational and leadership development. She has served for over twenty-five years in senior management positions with a variety of non-profit organizations. She is the founding director of the Women's Foundation of California's Women's Policy Institute, a 12 month program training women in public policy advocacy. She is a senior consultant with the California Breast Cancer Research Program, working as both the lead trainer for the Community Research Collaboration awards and facilitating the development of the five year, $18 million dollar strategic planning project to fund innovative research on the environmental causes of breast cancer and the causes of breast cancer disparities. Marj has a Master's degree in Nonprofit Management from the University of San Francisco and a Doctorate in public health from the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Berkeley with Tracy, the love of her life, a research sociologist at UCSF, and their two yellow labs, Beaumont and Buddy.
Dr. Terry received her PhD in Epidemiology from Columbia University in 1999, after receiving her MA in Economics from the University of Washington in 1990. Dr. Terry focuses her research on breast cancer and on the molecular epidemiology and lifecourse methods of the disease, and in particular she is investigating how adult health and diseases such as breast cancer may be influenced by prenatal and early life exposures. She has led two large-scale studies of adult health in U.S. birth cohorts focusing on early life predictors of mammographic density. She has also focused on family-based studies and is currently leading the New York site of the Breast Cancer Family Registry (BCFR) and measuring breast cancer risk within affected and unaffect family-based cohorts based on integrating information from PEDIGREE, clinical, genetic and epidemiologic data. She has recently initiated a study of young girls within these same high risk families to examine early life factors and early indicators of breast cancer risk (The LEGACY Girls Study). Her work in studying birth cohorts as well as other family-based cohorts includes studies investigating the role of prenatal exposures on DNA methylation patterns and other biomarkers of risk and understanding the role of biomarker changes in altering cancer risk.She recently reported that prenatal exposures affect the timing of menarche, adult body size, and epigenetic changes - all indicators of future cancer risk. Dr. Terry teaches introductory and advanced epidemiologic methods at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University
Ann received her Master's of Public Health degree from Columbia University in 2010, with a focus on cancer epidemiology and her Bachelor's degree from Emory University in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology. In addition to the PEDIGREE study she works with Dr. Terry on the New York site of the Breast Cancer Family Registry (BCFR) and the LEGACY Girls Study. Previous to her work at Columbia University, Ann was based in Atlanta and worked for Emory University School of Medicine at the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center. Ann's research interests include evaluating the effectiveness of national cancer prevention guidelines among women with a family history of breast cancer, DNA methylation of genetic promoter regions, and the methodology of family-based data collection. She lives in Manhattan with her husband and two dogs, one beagle and one shepard mutt. Ann's interests include cooking, biking, walking her dogs and traveling whenever possible.