Dr. Steven R. Browning is an Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology. He is also the Assistant Director of the Central Appalachian Regional Education and Research Center and an associate faculty member in the Kentucky Injury Prevention and Research Center.
Before becoming a faculty member in the College of Public Health, he was in the UK College of Nursing and the UK College of Medicine. Dr. Browning teaches graduate level courses in advanced epidemiologic methods, study design, occupational and environmental epidemiology, and social epidemiology. He has advised more than 150 graduate students for doctoral dissertations and master’s theses.
Dr. Browning’s interests are in occupational, injury, and environmental epidemiology. He has conducted population-based research projects on agricultural health concerns among farmers and farm families in Kentucky. Along with UK colleagues, he was awarded a five-year grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) for their project “Community-engaged research & action to reduce respiratory disease in Appalachia” to examine respiratory health disparities among adults in Eastern Kentucky.
Using a community-based participatory research approach, they have conducted an epidemiologic assessment to investigate the relationships among indoor air pollutants, behavioral and social determinants, and their cumulative effects on the risk of respiratory disease, especially asthma and COPD, among adults in rural Appalachia.
He has also worked on several collaborative interdisciplinary research projects employing traditional and novel epidemiologic research designs. Collaborating with faculty in the UK College of Nursing, he has been an investigator on studies of the health of long-haul truckers, the health of older farmers in Kentucky and South Carolina, and the issue of suicide among older farmers in the Southeastern United States. He has been involved in many studies using ecologic designs to examine the health effects, including breast, ovarian, and reproductive outcomes, of exposure to the pesticide atrazine. He received national recognition related to his research on a putative cancer cluster in Pennsylvania.
Previously, he has been a principal investigator on a NIOSH-funded cohort study entitled “Children's Injuries on Kentucky Beef Cattle Farms" and Co-PI on a grant funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, "Chronic Arsenic Exposure from Drinking Water and Reproductive Effects,” an international study undertaken in Chile.
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