Urmila Kodavanti PhD, DABT

Dr. Urmila P. Kodavanti, PhD, DABT, has received the 2022 SOT Leading Edge in Basic Science Award for her novel, rigorous, and impactful research on the scientific understanding of how irritant air pollutants adversely affect human health.

Dr. Kodavanti received her PhD in pesticide toxicology from Maharaja Sayajirao University in India in 1983. She then conducted postdoctoral training at Michigan State University, the University of Mississippi Medical Center, and the US Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA), focusing in this final position on phosgene, ozone, and particulate matter toxicity in animal models. Dr. Kodavanti is currently a Senior Research Biologist at the US EPA Center for Public Health and Environmental Assessment. She also is a Faculty Affiliate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

At the leading edge of the toxicology field, Dr. Kodavanti’s research has provided not only a plausible new paradigm for multi-organ effects due to air pollutant exposure but also a likely linkage of the effects among these organ systems. Dr. Kodavanti has delivered convincing, scientifically based evidence that this linkage involves metabolic and immune/inflammatory deregulation caused by pollutant-induced neuroendocrine stress. Chronic stress is well known to contribute to a variety of health conditions, including cardiovascular, diabetes, and aging. Dr. Kodavanti has now documented that short-term exposure to a prototypical pollutant, ozone, uses a similar stress response pathway involving the sympathetic adrenal medullary and hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis, and the release of stress hormones that initiate or modulate pulmonary and systemic inflammation as well as metabolic homeostatic changes in rodents and humans.

In addition to this work, Dr. Kodavanti is leading cutting-edge research efforts to elucidate how adrenergic and glucocorticoid receptors are involved in the homeostatic regulation of metabolic and immune processes, and how their dysregulation with air pollutant exposure might explain disease susceptibility. Her research also has provided new avenues to explore the cellular and molecular mechanisms responsible for systemic and organ-specific toxicology of ozone, particulate matter, and other criteria air pollutants. This will lead to more effective intervention strategies on a public and personal level to mitigate or prevent the devastating human health effects of increasing ambient air pollution generated by fossil fuel combustion, wildland fires, and climate change.

In addition to her research, Dr. Kodavanti is highly active in several editorial activities. She is a longtime Associate Editor for both Inhalation Toxicology and the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part B, as well as serving on the Editorial Boards of four additional journals, among them Toxicological Sciences.

Dr. Kodavanti is a highly awarded scientist. In addition to six US EPA Scientific and Technological Achievement Awards for her publications since 2016, she has received several awards for best paper from SOT Specialty Sections, including the 2021 Molecular and Systems Biology Specialty Section Paper of the Year Award, and the 2020 Inhalation and Respiratory Specialty Section Paper of the Year Award. Dr. Kodavanti has been an SOT member since 2002 and is a Past President of the Inhalation and Respiratory Specialty Section, which recognized her with the Inhalation and Respiratory Specialty Section Career Achievement Award in 2020