Beate Ritz, MD, PhD
Area of Focus
- Epidemiology
Biography
Beate Ritz joined the faculty of the School of Public Health at UCLA in 1995 and is currently Professor and Vice Chair of the Epidemiology Department and holds co-appointments in the Environmental Health department at the UCLA School of Public Health and in Neurology, UCLA School of Medicine; she is a member of the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health (COEH), the Southern California Environmental Health Science Center (SCEHSC), and co-directed the formerly NIEHS-funded UCLA Center for Gene-Environment Studies of Parkinson’s disease.
Dr. Ritz received her MD (1983) and a PhD (1987) in Medical Sociology from the University of Hamburg Germany; spend her residency at the Psychiatric University-Hospital in Hamburg, and earned a PhD degree in Epidemiology in 1995 from UCLA, USA.
As an environmental epidemiologist, her research focuses on the health effects of occupational and environmental toxins such as pesticides and air pollution. In her research she uses geographic information system (GIS) modeling of environmental exposures as well a biomarkers and investigates links between genetic susceptibility factors and environmental exposures. Measurement and modeling of environmental factors has been a special focus of her lab for decades. She is the principle investigator of two of the largest community-based studies of Parkinson’s disease worldwide located in the central valley of California (PEG) and in Denmark (PASIDA). These studies identified environmental risk factors for Parkinson’s disease onset and progression using geographic information systems as well as metabolomic, genomic, and epigenomic approaches; most recently, her lab she has started to integrate the gut microbiome into these investigations. She is the Past President and a Fellow of the International Society of Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE), has served on numerous National Academy of Sciences and California State Scientific Advisory panels and committees, and recently received the Society for Epidemiology Research (SER) Ken Rothman Career Achievement Award.