Dr. Sylvia Hood Washington

Dr. Sylvia Hood Washington is a highly accomplished and successful environmental epidemiologist, environmental engineer, environmental historian, and clinician with over 30 years of research experience working on the impact of industrial pollution on human health. She successfully implemented the Research Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Superfund, and National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations for effluents and solid waste derived from power generation sources (space and terrestrial systems) for both private industry and NASA. She is also a genetic genealogist researching the 600-year-old history of her tri-racial family, which has roots in northern Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas since 1977. The paternal and maternal sides of the family also have ties to the Sephardic Jewish community. Her genealogy research began with traditional archives that evolved into genetic tools using multiple platforms like Ancestry.com, Family Tree DNA, 23and Me, and Gedmatch. She has now identified over 17,000 DNA relatives through her research.

She is a published author ("Packing Them In: An Archaeology of Environmental Racism in Chicago, 1865-1954" (2005) and "Echoes from the Poisoned Well: Global Memories of Environmental Injustice" (2006)) and the founding creator and editor-in-chief of the first international environmental health disparities journal, Environmental Justice (Mary Ann Liebert Publishers, Inc.). She was the first African-American historian to study and publish a formal history of environmental injustices in the United States in 2006 (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers). Dr. Washington was the first African American to receive a Ph.D. in the History of Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine from Case Western Reserve University in 2000 and the first African American woman to ever receive a Master’s of Science in Systems and Control Engineering from Case Institute of Technology (1987). She was also the first black woman to become a journeyman engineer at NASA, Region V, where she worked on the public and environmental health risks of low earth orbit missions after the 1987 Challenger Disaster. Dr. Washington consults regularly with environmental law firms and grassroots community groups to help them understand the history of industrial operations, transportation systems, and municipal planning’s impact on human health and environmental health disparities.

In November 2010, she was elected Co-Chair of the Illinois EPA’s Environmental Justice Advisory Board. In 2012, she was appointed by Governor Patrick Quinn to sit on the first Environmental Justice Commission for the state of Illinois.

Her scholarly interests are focused on environmental epidemiology, genetic epidemiology, biostatistics, operations research, surveillance, and GIS (geographical information systems) to research the emergence of health disparities in marginalized communities and their relationship to environmental pollution stemming from technology, industrialization, engineering design and urbanization and more recently Covid19. Professional interests also include environmental literacy, health cognition, and activism among African Americans, Africans, Latinos, and ethnic immigrant populations and how they respond to environmental degradation and environmental health disparities in their communities as a function of their socio-economic status and clinical health predispositions.

Dr. Washington was diagnosed in 2023 with four genetic lipid disorders, including the fatty acid oxidation disorder CPT2 Deficiency. Mitochondrial disease research is now a central interest because it helps her understand her familial health disorders (cardiovascular disorders, diabetes, kidney disease, and NAFLD) and environmental health disorders in environmental justice communities. In 2022, she developed a course in an inaugural data science academy: Epidemiology, Big Data for Disease and Disparities. Dr. Washington is now an adjunct professor for Baylor University’s public health program.

Dr. Washington is currently on the Editorial Board of the National Catholic Report Earthbeat Magazine. In 2023, she became an Ambassador for the United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation (UMDF) and a MitoChampion for the MitoAction Foundation.