Leadership Team

The PEGS Executive Leadership Committee (ELC) represents the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences. The committee provides overall governance and oversight to ensure the safety and privacy of study participants and their data. The committee reviews and approves research concept proposals, add-on studies, and manuscripts prior to submission for publication and liaises with outside investigators working with PEGS data.

Janet E. Hall, M.D., M.S. (PI, PEGS)
Janet Hall is Clinical Director of NIEHS, Principal Investigator and Chief of the Clinical Research Branch, and Head of the Reproductive Physiology and Pathophysiology Group. In addition to her extensive clinical and clinical research experience at a programmatic level, her research examines the neuroendocrine interactions that govern normal and abnormal reproductive function, including the effects of genetic and environmental stresses.

Alison A. Motsinger-Reif, Ph.D. (Co-PI, PEGS)
Alison Motsinger-Reif is a Principal Investigator and Chief of the Biostatistics and Computational Biology Branch. Her research focuses on the development and application of modern statistical approaches for understanding the etiology of common, complex diseases, including gene-environment interactions.

David C. Fargo, Ph.D.
David Fargo is Director of Environmental Science Cyberinfrastructure. He leads planning and development of NIEHS informatics and information technology systems and strategy. HIs work enables scientific discovery by facilitating scientific collaborations and team-based science, and by communicating findings to the broader community.

Charles S. Schmitt, Ph.D.
Charles Schmitt is Director of the Office of Data Science. He leads NIEHS efforts in data science, primarily focused on implementing the NIH strategic plan for data science within the environmental health community. These tasks include advancement of intramural and extramural data systems that meet FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) principals, development of data standards and policies, and data science training.

Advisory Groups

An independent group of experts advises PEGS researchers on study implementation, direction, data analysis, and reporting. Members of the PEGS Advisory Group include senior scientists with interest or expertise in epidemiology, clinical research, biostatistics, human genetics, computational biology, and other related fields.

The Internal Advisory Committee (IAC)

• Chair: Michael Fessler, M.D., Chief, Immunity, Inflammation, and Disease Laboratory and Principal Investigator
• Members:
  • Bill Copeland, Ph.D., Chief, Genome Integrity and Structural Biology Laboratory and Principal Investigator
  • Alison Harrill, Ph. D., Geneticist, Molecular Toxicology and Genomics Group
• Ad-hoc Member: Janet Hall, M.D., M.S., Clinical Director and Principal Investigator

The External Advisory Committee (EAC)

• Michael Snyder, M.D. – Professor in Genetics, Snyder Lab, Department of Genetics, Stanford University
• Fred Wright – Director of the Bioinformatics Research Center, Department of Statistics, North Carolina State University
• Leslie Biesecker, M.D. – NIH Distinguished Investigator, Medical Genomics and Metabolic Genetics Branch, National Human Genome Research Institute
• David Peden, M.D., M.S. – Center for Environmental Medicine, Asthma, and Lung Biology, Gillings School of Global Public Health, UNC-Chapel Hill