Environmental Health Sciences Center

Wildfire Health Risks: Understanding the Chemical Drivers and Underlying Mechanisms of Highly Variable Smoke Exposure Conditions    

Dr. Julia Rager is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Rager is also a faculty member at the the Institute for Environmental Health Solutions, the UNC Superfund Research Program, and the UNC Center for Environmental Medicine, Asthma and Lung Biology. Dr. Rager’s ongoing research encompasses various mixture exposure conditions, target organs, and disease outcomes. 

Dr. Rager's work on wildfire smoke exposures was recently featured in the NIEHS Environmental Factor Newsletter. Some of her recent papers on wildfire smoke exposure include: 

• Wildfire Variable Toxicity: Identifying Biomass Smoke Exposure Groupings through Transcriptomic Similarity Scoring. Koval LE*, Carberry CK*, Kim YH, McDermott E*, Hartwell H, Jaspers I, Gilmour MI, Rager JE++.  (2022). Environ Sci Technol., 56(23), 17131-17142.
• Wildfires and extracellular vesicles: Exosomal microRNAs as mediators of cross-tissue cardiopulmonary responses to biomass smoke. Carberry CK*, Koval LE*, Payton A#, Hartwell H, Ho Kim Y, Smith GJ, Reif DM, Jaspers I, Ian Gilmour M, Rager JE++.  (2023). Environ Int.