Dr. Jenni Shearston is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management and in the School of Public Health, where she specializes in environmental epidemiology and exposure science. Shearston works on pollutants and other toxic metals in the environment to gauge how these materials are exposed to vulnerable communities.
“What I find very motivating is this imbalance of power between corporations and businesses who are often polluting and communities that are really dealing with the negative externalities of that relationship without getting a lot of benefit or having any say,” she said.
The science behind how our bodies are impacted by exposures is key in understanding how pollution affects the public in myriad ways. Shearston was recently praised for her work along with her team on tampons that revealed how several brands that millions of people use each year can contain toxic metals like lead, arsenic, and cadmium. This study has now prompted an investigation by the US Food and Drug Administration that will examine the potential harm to women from heavy metals found in tampons.
“We found 12 of the 16 metals we tested for in every single tampon, including lead, which is kind of scary,” she said. “It is surprising that no one has done it. Tampons have been around since the 1930s and we've known how harmful lead and arsenic are for hundreds of years.”
Shearston is currently working to further this research on tampons to find out whether the concerning amount of toxic materials is contributing to any negative health effects. This is aligned with her motivation to work in public health, precisely to uncover how overlooked minorities are directly or indirectly impacted by policies.
“I have been interested in both teaching and medicine for a really long time, and public health is a really great kind of mixture of both these social elements of teaching in and working with people in communities and partnerships,” she further said.
Before coming to Berkeley, she earned her PhD degree in Environmental Health Sciences from Columbia University and a master’s in Public Health from New York University. Originally from Colorado, Shearston wants to continue her research in finding out how half the population is being impacted by the toxic materials in tampons. This research was initially a project idea started at Columbia University with help from her mentor Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou.
At UC Berkeley, she looks forward to working with her advisor, Professor Rachel Morello-Frosch who specializes in social determinants of environmental health disparities. Shearston praises Morello-Frosch’s work in different levels of community engagement and how her work addresses relevant policy questions every step of the way.
With all the cutting-edge research that Shearston has done, she said that it is still difficult to continue a path that has never been explored before, especially when the world is still mulling over if safe menstruation is a public health concern.
“The lack of knowledge about menstruation generally, not just in the public but [also] among scientists, is also something that made me think really hard about how I can overcome these biases that people might be bringing to the table,” she said.
However, every problem Shearston faces is another puzzle that she knows she can solve. “I try to set it up like it's a series of questions that we need to address because no one had done it before, which means to start at the beginning.”