Dr. Habre is a tenured Professor of Environmental Health and Spatial Sciences at USC, jointly appointed in the Department of Population and Public Health Sciences, Keck School of Medicine, and the Dornsife Spatial Sciences Institute.
A native of Beirut, Lebanon, her doctoral training is in in Environmental Health at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, with expertise in exposure science and air quality. Her lab uses cutting edge, real-time environmental and geo-location sensors, remote sensing, and geospatial analysis to investigate environmental links to disease.
Her lab's research is transdisciplinary in nature and focused on two major, interconnected themes: 1) Advancing precision environmental health by developing state-of-the-art exposure science (or “exposomics”) methods; and 2) Understanding the health effects of co-exposure to complex air pollution mixtures and social stressors across the life course, in vulnerable populations, and in light of climate change, especially for unregulated pollutants (e.g. ultrafine particles, wildfire smoke) and microenvironments (e.g. indoors).
Dr. Habre is PI/Director of the CLIMA Climate-Related Exposures, Adaptation and Health Center at USC (NIH P20HL176204,, https://clima.usc.edu/), and MPI/co-Director of the NEXUS: Network for Exposomics in the U.S. (NIH U24ES036819), the first of its kind NIH-wide research coordination center tasked with advancing exposomics and precision environmental health (https://www.nexus-exposomics.org/).
Select appointments:
--- State-of-the-Science and the Future of Cumulative Impact Assessment National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) committee member (2024-2026)
--- Standing Committee on the Use of Emerging Science for Environmental Health Decisions, NASEM (2022 - 2023)
--- Emerging Science on Indoor Chemistry consensus study and committee, NASEM (2021- 2023)
--- Technical Expert Panel, Expanding Climate Change and Health Data Infrastructure to Advance Health Interventions: Linking Health and Environmental Data to Improve Patient and Community Health, HHS Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Trust Fund (2023 - current)
--- Source Specific Burden of Disease Methodology Expert Working Group, WHO Global Air Pollution and Health Technical Advisory Group, World Health Organization (2021 - current)
Dr. Habre's Lab Research Interests
1. Developing measurement and modeling methods for advancing air pollution exposure science
2. Use of real-time mHealth technologies, personal monitoring, sensors, geolocation and informatics for precision environmental health
3. Epidemiological investigations of the effects of air pollution mixtures and sources on the health of vulnerable populations across the life course
4. Cumulative impact of environmental health disparities and climate change on exposure and health burden in affected populations