Today at Brown

In junior high, Elizabeth Triche decided she would discover a cure for multiple sclerosis.

“I watched my aunt die of MS and the terrible impact it had on her family,” she recalled. “Of course it’s not that easy, but I stayed on the course to do medical research.

“Along the way, two other rare events steered me toward maternal and child health research,” Triche added. “My close friend died in childbirth at the age of 30 due to complications of HELLP syndrome [a more serious form of preeclampsia], and my niece died at one month of age from ‘complications of breastfeeding.’”

Triche has come to Brown from Yale’s Center for Perinatal, Pediatric and Environmental Epidemiology. As associate director, she supervised statistical analyses and data management for the center’s multiple research projects.

Focused primarily on women’s and children’s health, Triche’s research interests include genetics; the association between allergens, indoor and outdoor air pollutants on respiratory health in children and their mothers; and reproductive health, particularly preeclampsia, intrauterine growth restriction and preterm delivery. She also has investigated smoking cessation and relapse, exposure to nutritional biomarkers and gait outcomes in MS patients.

“So many things fascinate me,” she said. “That’s why my interests are so broad.”

Triche has designed and implemented many large epidemiologic studies requiring collaboration of multiple hospitals, community physicians, and research personnel, including clinical trials, prospective observational studies, and administrative epidemiology. She also has considerable experience working with a variety of community-based agencies focused on maternal and child health.

“I was drawn to Brown because of the growth, particularly in the Public Health Program,” Triche said. “It should be an exciting time to be here.

“I was also excited about the collaborative opportunities with talented faculty members and numerous public health research centers. I am also interested in the opportunity to do more teaching.”

This fall, Triche will teach PHP2120 — “Introduction to Methods in Epidemiologic Research.” In the spring she expects to teach a new course, either “Reproductive Epidemiology” or “Data Management and Analysis.”