Dr. John R. Balmes is a pulmonary physician, professor of medicine at University of California, San Francisco, and chief of the division of occupational and environmental medicine at San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH). His research is principally in occupational and environmental respiratory disease. Dr. Balmes studies the effects of exposures to air pollution in his human exposure laboratory at San Francisco General Hospital and the chronic effects of such exposures in epidemiological studies with collaborators at both UCSF and UC Berkeley.
Jim Gauderman is a professor of biostatistics in the Department of Preventive Medicine at the USC Keck School of Medicine. For more than a decade, he has investigated the association between urban air pollution and children's respiratory health as principal investigator for the Children's Health Study. He also has worked to develop methods for understanding the joint association of genetic and environmental factors on the risk of human disease, including asthma and cancer. He received his a master's in science from USC in 1988 and his Ph.D. from USC in 1992.
As the fastest growing ethnic population in the United States, Latinos have a major impact on the health care system. Nearly one in three Americans will be Latino by 2050, according to an August 2008 estimate by the U.S. Census Bureau. The Latino population is expected to nearly triple from 46.7 million in 2008 to 132.8 million in 2050. As a percentage of the overall U.S. population, Latinos will more than double from 15 to 30 percent.
