Rachel Tao
Community Needs Assessment Intern, she/her/hers
Rachel Tao is an MPH candidate in the Epidemiology Department with a certificate in Applied Biostatistics at the Mailman School of Public Health. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Biology from Columbia University, where she became involved in urban green projects and plant ecophysiology research. In her junior and senior years, she focused her research on green roofs as a way of reducing storm-water runoff that can lead to combined sewer overflow in cities with combined sewage systems, culminating in a senior thesis on differences in water-use for plant species on green roofs in upper Manhattan and the Bronx.
After graduating, she continued this work at the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation through a larger study in a greenhouse setting, which identified plant species best suited for use on Parks Department green roofs. Following this experience, she worked for two years as a Research Assistant and Fellowship Coordinator at the Division of Pediatric Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Metabolism at CUIMC. In this capacity, she collaborated on clinical research projects about childhood obesity, premature adrenarche, and Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, resulting in five co-author publications in academic journals. She participated in grant-writing for the pediatric endocrinology fellowship program’s T32 grant and coordinated fellowship evaluation and admissions processes. Since 2016 she has volunteered as a rape crisis and domestic violence survivor advocate with the Crime Victims Treatment Center, work that kindled in her an interest in violence prevention.
Since coming to Mailman, this interest has led to her participation in a Firearm Mapping project in collaboration with the Rutgers Center on Gun Violence Research. In keeping with her ongoing interest in environmental science, she also works in Professor Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglu’s environmental epidemiology lab on environmental mixtures methodology research.