Dr. Jeanne Mager Stellman is an international authority on occupational health and safety, as well as women's health. She is Deputy Head of the Department of Health Policy and Management and Director of the Program in General Public Health at the Mailman School of Public Health on the Columbia campus, which offers established professionals or those with advanced degrees the opportunity to obtain training and credentials in the field of public health.

Appointed to the faculty of the Mailman School of Public Health in 1980, Dr. Stellman was the first person to be awarded a five-year National Cancer Institute (NCI) Preventive Oncology Award and was Assistant Director for Cancer Control in the Comprehensive Cancer Center at the Columbia campus. Seeing a critical need for occupational health information and programs for women, she created the Women's Occupational Health Resource Center, which provided services, trained students, and published a newsletter for nearly a decade. During that period, Dr. Stellman developed a core curriculum on reproductive hazards in the workplace. She became Editor of Women & Health, a peer-reviewed journal that she continues to edit. The journal publishes contributed articles on broad issues in epidemiology and women's health, as well as special themed issues, such as "Domestic Violence and Health Care," "Women's Work, Health, and Quality of Life," and "Welfare, Work, and Well-Being."

In 1988, Dr. Stellman was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to use her training as a physical chemist to break down barriers and improve understanding between the fields of chemistry and toxicology. Three years later, she became Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopaedia of Occupational Health and Safety, published by the International Labor Office in Geneva. Already a standard reference work around the world, the Fourth Edition of the Encyclopaedia broke new ground with its coverage of the health hazards of high technology, in addition to its more traditional contents, including information on organization of work; management and policy; and hundreds of industries, hazards, and chemicals.

Dr. Stellman’s research career has focused on health of women, gender bias, occupational health, and health of veterans. She headed the Columbia University-American Legion study of Vietnam Veterans, and in 1985 was appointed by Judge Jack Weinstein as Exposure Consultant to the Federal District Court administering the Agent Orange Veteran Payment Program. In 1998, based on work done collaboratively with her epidemiologist husband, Dr. Steven Stellman, she was awarded a $5 million contract from the National Academy of Sciences to develop research methodology for assessing exposure to Agent Orange and other military herbicides used in the Vietnam War.

To read more about Dr. Stellman’s Agent Orange research, read the article here