Principal Investigator and Center Director

Susan L. Schantz, Ph.D., is a professor of environmental toxicology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an internationally recognized expert on environmental contaminants and neurodevelopment.

For Dr. Schantz, the FRIENDS Center represents more than just another research project. She has been studying the human health effects of PCBs since she was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has spent most of her academic career studying PCB contamination in the Great Lakes region. She grew up in Green Bay, and the FRIENDS project touches her personally.

As the Center director, she frequently visits her hometown and is often asked by Hmong and Laotian study participants where she is from. Not only are they surprised to find that she grew up in the area, Dr. Schantz likes to tell them that her father, Bob Haglund, was a teacher for many years at West High School, in a neighborhood where many Hmong and Laotian people now live. Her mother Carolyn was a reporter for the Green Bay Press Gazette. This often helps break the ice, she says. “They don’t necessarily feel, ‘Why is this person from Illinois coming up here to do research?’”

The recent influx of Hmong and Laotian immigrants into Green Bay has presented the FRIENDS investigators with a unique opportunity to study the health effects of fish-borne contaminants in humans. Many of the immigrants in the study live near the Fox River in Wisconsin, which is one of the most heavily PCB-contaminated sites in the Great Lakes basin. These populations have a much greater tendency to engage in subsistence fishing and be at risk of exposure, Dr. Schantz says. Children and adolescents are especially vulnerable.

“During development, the brain is very sensitive to chemical exposure,” she says, noting that a major focus of the Center’s research is neuropsychological function in adolescent children. “There is a lot of research, including from our own lab, to show that PCBs impair executive function such as attention and inhibitory control in animal models. These are abilities that are rapidly developing during adolescence. But very little is known about whether PCB exposure in humans during adolescence has an impact on these functions. We’re trying to address that.”

In addition to studying fisheaters in the Hmong and Lao communities, the Center is also working to make similar evaluations in adolescents from the general population of sport anglers. There are approximately 1.4 million licensed anglers in Wisconsin, making the State an ideal location for assessing the health risks from contaminated fish. More>>>