Completed Projects

The objective of Dr. Liew’s NIH’s Pathway to Independence Award (K99/R00) was to investigate associations between prenatal per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) exposure and neurodevelopmental trajectories from age 5 to 16 using multiple outcome assessments (including epilepsy, social competence, mental health, intellectual capacity, and school performance) based on data from the Danish National Birth Cohort (DNBC).

The project was co-directed by Drs. Zeyan Liew and Dr. Joshua D. Wallach and funded by the Yale-Mayo Clinic FDA Center of Excellence in Regulatory Science and Innovation (CERSI). The Yale team collaborated with the FDA to (1) systematically identify, summarize, and compare quantitative bias analysis (QBA) approaches, and (2) develop a user-friendly decision matrix that will allow investigators to identify QBA methods based on different study characteristics.

This project funded by the NIH/NIEHS (R03ES033381) addresses an area of PFAS research that has been largely overlooked: whether paternal exposure to PFAS influences offspring growth and neurodevelopment. The Liew lab collaborated with the INUENDO cohort, a multi-country longitudinal cohort study of parents and their children from Greenland, Kharkiv (Ukraine), and Warsaw (Poland), to lead this project.