FROM NIEHS: Path to environmental engineering

Upal Ghosh: If I go back and think about it, my early childhood played a big role. My father worked in a research institute in a coal mining town called Dhanbad in Bihar, India. He was the head of the Health Division at the Mining Research Institute.

My father was a chemist by training, and he was researching the correlation between air pollution and cardiovascular disease in miners. I remember he had a jar with a preserved lung of a coal miner, and it was black from the coal dust. Seeing that black lung left a big imprint on me.

I watched my father on local rooftops, conducting air sampling, and then going to hospitals to collect data on cardiovascular disease to correlate with mining activities. I’m sure that had an impact on how I viewed the relationship between environmental health and human health. That interest grew over time.

I went on to study chemical engineering in Bombay. I’m an undergraduate chemical engineer by training, but I didn’t want to work in industry. I became more interested in the environment and nature, and I joined the nature club. My experiences led me to pursue environmental engineering.

I completed my master’s and Ph.D. in environmental engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Then I spent a few years at Stanford University with Dick Luthy, who was one of my greatest mentors, before being hired here at UMBC to start our environmental engineering program. We’ve made great strides over the past 22 years, and we have built a strong program here.

Photo credit: Rick Woychik, Ph.D., directs NIEHS and the National Toxicology Program. (Image courtesy of NIEHS)