Paloma I. Beamer, Ph.D., joined the College of Public Health in 2007 as an assistant professor in Environmental Health Sciences. The central motivation behind her research is in the development of tools that can help provide more robust exposure and dose estimates and improve the demonstration of a relationship between measured environmental concentrations and resulting health effects, particularly amongst children and underserved populations.

Currently Dr. Beamer is using both computer modeling and laboratory techniques in her research. She has developed an exposure and dose model that she is utilizing to estimate pesticide exposures of farmworkers' children. As an expert in micro-activity patterns she is examining the activity patterns of older children and utilizing them to estimate dust ingestion. Dr. Beamer is also using GIS techniques to assess the risk of wheezing from exposure to traffic pollutants in early childhood. Dr. Beamer has built a laboratory to characterize exposure and risk of water-borne contaminants. Currently she is using this laboratory to measure the concentration of tricholoethylene in breastmilk and water contaminants in Nogales. She is conducting a field study to characterize how outdoor soil contaminants contribute to contaminant levels inside homes, of particular concern for communities near abandoned mines and hazardous waste sites.

Dr. Beamer has served as Academic Councilor on the Board of the International Society of Exposure Science. She also serves on the advisory board for the Latino/a Association for Graduate Students in Engineering and Science at the University. She has been a long time member of the Society for Hispanic Professional Engineers and the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science.