Erik Svendsen

Dr. Erik R. Svendsen received his PhD in Preventive Medicine and Environmental Health from the University of Iowa, where he completed doctoral studies in environmental epidemiology and exposure science with a special research focus on environmental lung diseases. After graduation Dr. Svendsen was selected for a prestigious post-doctoral fellowship with the US EPA in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. While in Chapel Hill Dr. Svendsen directed two large collaborative studies with researchers from the EPA and both the schools of public health and medicine at the University of North Carolina’s Center for Environmental Medicine, Asthma, and Lung Biology in studying the health effects of air pollution on asthmatic children and adults. Dr. Svendsen later became a Research Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina, where he also served as the State Environmental Epidemiologist for SC DHEC for 7 years. Over that time period he further developed expertise in disaster epidemiology, having led the public health recovery and research in the Graniteville chlorine disaster population and led the pulmonary epidemiology studies in a pediatric cohort exposed to radiation from the Chernobyl disaster. Dr. Svendsen then joined the Disaster Management program at the Tulane University School of Public Health & Tropical Medicine as an Associate Professor in the Department of Global Environmental Health Sciences where he taught in several environmental and occupational health or epidemiology courses over a 4-year period. While at Tulane he held a secondary affiliation with the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Environmental Medicine. Dr. Svendsen joined MUSC in July 2015 as a Professor to lead the new Division of Environmental Health within the Department of Public Health Sciences. At MUSC he holds a secondary affiliation with the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine. He is continuing his epidemiological research of disasters and environmental lung disease there at MUSC.