Meet the Principal Investigators

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Jeffrey L. Levin, MD, MSPH, FACOEM is Professor and Chair of the Department of Occupational and Environmental Medicine and the Department of Occupational Health Sciences at The University of Texas Health Center at Tyler. He is a graduate of the University of Texas Medical School at San Antonio. He completed his internal medicine training at the University of Missouri following which he pursued a Master of Science Degree in Public Health and post-graduate training in occupational medicine at the University of Kentucky.

He is board-certified in both internal medicine and occupational medicine. He has been in the field of occupational medicine for 20 years and has lectured widely on a variety of occupational health topics both nationally and internationally. His research interests include occupational respiratory disease and occupational health in the commercial fishing trades.

• Director of the Texas Institute of Occupational Safety & Health®
• Director of the NIOSH Southwest Center for Agricultural Health, Injury Prevention and Education
• Co-Director for the Southwest Center for Pediatric Environmental Health
• Program Director of the Occupational Medicine Residency Program at UTHCT.

He is past-President of the Texas College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (formerly the Texas Occupational Medical Association), the Texas component of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. Dr. Levin was awarded the Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professorship of Occupational Health Sciences in 1999. He is a member of the Texas Medical Association Council on Public Health.

Sharon Cooper, Ph.D. is a Professor of Epidemiology and Regional Dean of The University of Texas School of Public Health (UTSPH) located in San Antonio, Texas. She received her MS in Biostatistics and Epidemiology from Harvard School of Public Health in 1976 and her PhD from The University of Texas School of Public Health in 1982. She served as head of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Texas A&M School of Rural Public Health for five years before joining the San Antonio Regional Campus in July 2007. She has more than twenty-five years of research experience in injury, occupational and chronic disease epidemiology. She is an occupational epidemiologist whose major research focus has been on surveillance of occupational illnesses and injuries, and assessment of occupational exposures and their relation to adverse health effects. She is also interested in research in vulnerable working populations, particularly migrant farmworkers, and in child and adolescent workers. She has published in the area of injuries in farmworkers, substance use and occupational injuries, childhood cancer, pesticide safety training, ethical issues in working with vulnerable populations, and most recently is studying chronic disease risk factors in Hispanic youth. In addition to her work with the Southwest Center for Agricultural Health, Injury Prevention, and Education, she currently directs the occupational epidemiology training grant, a component of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health-funded education and research center in Houston.

Sylvia Partida, M.S.

Deborah Helitzer, ScD, is a Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine and Assistant Dean for Research Education at the School of Medicine at the University of New Mexico. Dr. Helitzer earned her doctorate from the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health (JHSHPH) in the field of international health communication, and led multiple multi-ethnic health communication programs overseas and in the United States. She developed and ran the first health communication program at JHSHPH from 1991-95, and has extensive experience in conducting formative research and implementing communication programs in international and domestic settings with multi-cultural groups. She has been at the University of New Mexico for 14 years and has conducted over 30 research studies during her tenure. Dr. Helitzer’s experience in international health serves her well in New Mexico, as most of her work involves the participation and collaboration of communities that experience significant health disparities, including those which include a high proportion of Native American and Hispanic community members. Her research with Navajo farmers and ranchers is an example of such collaborative endeavors, which involved capacity building of stakeholders to prevent agricultural injuries such as livestock injuries and pesticide poisonings.