Prof. Ha's research interests center on identifying and understanding environmental risk factors for health across the lifespan with a focus on perinatal health. Her work focuses on understanding how prenatal exposures affect subsequent health for both mothers and babies. Given an increasingly diverse at-risk population and the growing complexity of environmental threats, she is also interested in identifying vulnerable subgroups to help target effective intervention.
The San Joaquin Valley faces serious environmental issues including air pollution, extreme temperature, pesticides, and other social determinants of health. This area also has a relatively high prevalence of serious health issues including adverse pregnancy outcomes (e.g., preterm birth), asthma, Valley fever, diabetes, cancer and other chronic diseases.
Prof. Ha's primary goals at UCM are two-fold. First, she uses rigorous epidemiological methods to a) study the extent of adverse pregnancy outcomes as well as maternal and child health problems in the region, b) identify and understand the environmental causes of these problems, and c) ultimately devise intervention(s) to prevent these health problems at the population level. Second, she plans to build on her prior research by expanding her work to understand the etiology of other diseases endemic to the San Joaquin Valley including asthma, Valley fever, and certain types of cancer.
