Lydia Zablotska, MD, PhD, MPA, is a Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, where she serves as leader of the Occupational and Environmental Epidemiology area of concentration. Dr. Zablotska is a physician and epidemiologist with extensive training and publications in radiation epidemiology, biostatistics, and risk modeling. Beginning with her doctoral dissertation and the K07 Academic Career Training Award from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), her research has focused primarily on the examination of risks of radiation exposures in various occupational and environmental settings. Dr. Zablotska is passionate about her work on understanding the effects of occupational radiation exposures on health risks of nuclear power industry workers and workers of the uranium fuel production cycle and has conducted a number of studies in the U.S. and Canada.

Dr. Zablotska, a native of Ukraine, became interested in radiation epidemiology when she started working on the NCI-funded Chernobyl studies as a graduate student in 1997. She became a Principal Investigator of the studies in 2006. The studies were the first to show that exposures to ingested and inhaled radioactive iodines during childhood lead to increased risks of thyroid cancer similar to risks from external radiation. Study findings redefined emergency protocols for populations working or living around nuclear power plants and opened new areas of inquiry. Continuing her previous work on the effects of radiation exposures in medical settings, Dr. Zablotska is now pursuing research to examine risks of repeated X-ray fluoroscopies in a unique cohort of 64,000 Canadian tuberculosis patients, with detailed exposure and confounder data. The study will address critical gaps in our knowledge of the long-term health risks of protracted radiation exposures from medical diagnostic radiation exposures. It will also help determine appropriateness of current radiation safety standards, which are based on the risk projections from the study of survivors of atomic bombings in Japan.