My choice of profession was serendipitous. With a doctorate in statistics (from the University of California, Berkeley) and a master's degree in biostatistics (from Columbia University) I began working on the statistical issues in oral contraceptive research. I became increasingly interested in designing my own studies to answer questions raised by the data and after a few years was really doing more epidemiology than statistics, though that background gave me an important methodological foundation for my work. When I joined the California Department of Health I began to respond to public health concerns about the environment, particularly in the area of reproductive health and developed and led the Reproductive Epidemiology Section. This kept me busy for many years investigating community and worker concerns, for example, about reproductive effects of solvents in the workplace and disinfection byproducts in tap water. When I was appointed to the National Academy of Science's Committee on Hormone-Related Toxicants I became increasingly interested in environmental chemicals that affect the body's endocrine function. To work with other researchers interested in these questions, I moved to the University of Missouri-Columbia as a Research Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine and Adjunct Professor in Statistics.

Since 1998 I have been Principle Investigator of the Study for Future Families, a multi-center pregnancy cohort study which I designed to examine environmental causes of geographic variation in reproductive health endpoints, such as semen quality, sex hormones and time to pregnancy. I was recently elected Chair of the 2008 Gordon Research Conference on Environmental Endocrine Disruptors. I am currently a professor at the University of Rochester in New York.

Relevant Publications

Swan, S., Brazil, C., Drobnis, E. Z., Robin, F.L., Kruse, L., Hatch, M., Redmon, J. B., Wang, C., Overstreet, J. W., and The Study for Future Families Research Group. (2003). Geographic Differences in Semen Quality of Fertile U.S. Males, Environmental Health Perspectives 111, No. 4, 414-420.