New York - Leonardo Trasande, M.D., M.P.P.
Updated March 2004
Dr. Trasande currently serves as the Assistant Director for the Mount Sinai Center for Children's Health and the Environment (CCHE). CCHE is the nation's first academic research and policy center to examine the links between exposure to toxic pollutants and childhood illness.
Dr. Trasande earned a Master's degree in Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School. He completed a pediatrics residency at Boston Children's Hospital. During this residency, he noticed that residents rarely learned how to influence the policy-making process to improve the lives of children. As a result, he developed and established an advocacy training program for residents. As part of this residency program, he led a project which focused on improving the health of asthmatics in Jamaica Plain, an underserved neighborhood where asthma is unusually prevalent. Based on a survey and focus groups, they discovered a lack of understanding of asthma and general underutilization of existing community resources. Residents then developed and planned to study a school-based educational intervention for children in Jamaica Plain and their families about asthma. After his residency, Dr. Trasande served as a Dyson Advocacy Fellow to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, advising the Senator on environmental and child health issues.
In his current work at CCHE, Dr. Trasande uses his previous advocacy experiences to influence local, state and national policy. CCHE was established with funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts in 1998 within the Department of Community and Preventive Medicine of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. CCHE's mission is to protect children against environmental threats to health by conducting scientific research, translating research into medical practice, and educating policy makers and the public. Dr. Trasande is a Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics, and he continues to practice clinically both in New York and in Boston.
