Kyle Walsh, Ph.D., became Director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), which is part of the National Institutes of Health, on October 10, 2025. NIEHS is the world’s premier biomedical research organization focused on environmental health.
Walsh oversees the institute’s nearly $1 billion annual budget to advance a broad portfolio of intramural and grant-funded research into how the environment may affect human health. He also directs the National Toxicology Program, which is headquartered administratively at NIEHS.
Prior to assuming these leadership roles at NIEHS, Walsh led a pioneering research program at Duke University, studying how genetic, epigenetic, and environmental factors can interact to influence brain health, cancer risk, and aging. He is a renowned neuro-epidemiologist whose work on glial senescence and gliomagenesis has provided critical insight into how the interplay of environmental exposures and biological processes of aging can lead to human disease.
At Duke, he served as Associate Professor of Neurosurgery, Pathology, Population Health Sciences, and Pediatrics, and as Director of the Division of Neuro-epidemiology. Walsh was also a Senior Fellow in the Duke Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development and a member of the Duke Cancer Institute, where he co-led the Neuro-Oncology Research Program.
In addition, Walsh helped to launch a robust research response to the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. He provided scientific leadership to U.S. Senators in the state, outlining key research gaps and paving the way for important collaborations across multiple federal agencies.
Walsh holds bachelor’s degrees in both molecular genetics and anthropology from The Ohio State University, and he earned his Ph.D. in chronic disease epidemiology from the Yale School of Public Health. He completed postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Francisco.