The RENEW Institute - A Multidisciplinary Initiative
RENEW Faculty Fellow
RENEW’s inaugural Faculty Fellow is Lina Mu. Professor of Epidemiology and Environmental Health, and Director of UB’s Office of Global Health Initiatives, Lina Mu, MD, PhD, is an internationally recognized environmental epidemiologist whose work examines air pollution, chemical contaminants, and related health outcomes across the lifespan. Her research advances understanding of environmental exposure assessment, biological mechanisms, preventive interventions, and life‑course impacts on child development and human health.
Dr. Mu has directly advanced RENEW’s mission over recent years. She led the institute’s Environmental Pollution and Human Health Implications focus area, co-organized a 2024 planning-grant workshop to build teams for a future NIEHS Superfund Research Program proposal, and is now collaborating with several RENEW faculty members in formulation of a proposed center’s research cores. This spring, in her capacity as director of UB’s Office of Global Health Initiatives, she is co-organizing the conference “Climate Change and Emerging Contaminants: Risks and Responses in Asia and Beyond,” with RENEW, the Asia Research Institute, and the Center for Climate Change and Health Equity.
As a RENEW Faculty Fellow, Dr. Mu has developed continuing collaborations with other members of our community, including RENEW Core Faculty members Dr. Kang Sun and Dr. Meng Wang. With Dr. Sun, she is pursuing ongoing collaborative projects and proposal development on air pollution data analysis. With Dr. Wang and the Buffalo Prenatal and Perinatal Network, Dr. Mu recently secured a $500K grant from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC). ’s Air Pollution Mitigation program to conduct a randomized indoor‑air‑quality intervention among pregnant women in underserved Buffalo neighborhoods who are disproportionately affected by air pollution. Support from RENEW will expand and strengthen this community-engaged study by enabling timely biospecimen collection to test mechanistic hypotheses related to air-pollution mitigation, and enable enhanced monitoring of indoor pollutants, including chemical constituents and pollen, among study participants with asthma.