Position Title
Professor of Public Health Sciences
Professor of the Center for Health and the Environment
Deborah Bennett, PhD is an exposure scientist whose research both measures and models chemicals in dust, air and consumer products.
Dr. Bennett studies volatile and semi-volatile organic compounds (VOCs and SVOCs) like plasticizers, electronics, cosmetics, flame retardants, pesticides and particulate matter. Working closely with epidemiologists and toxicologists, she researches how chemicals make their way into the body and set off biological reactions that lead to certain diseases and conditions, from asthma to autism.
One of the first scientists to measure VOCs in non-residential spaces like restaurants and stores, Dr. Bennett’s pioneering work has led to a much clearer understanding of the risk of exposure to certain chemicals and how they move through different environments.
She introduced the idea of characteristic travel distance to explain how far chemicals travel outdoors, as well as characteristic time to show how they linger both outdoors and indoors. She also came up with a metric called intake fraction to calculate how much of a chemical released into the environment a person inhales, ingests or absorbs through their skin.
Fearless in her hunt for potentially harmful chemical compounds, Dr. Bennett loves studying the elusive ones we know so little about.