Dr. Fenna C. M. Sillé is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she also serves as Deputy Director of the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT) and directs the JHU Exposome Collaborative.
Guided by the motto “ a healthy environment = healthy people,” Dr. Sillé investigates how the exposome shapes immunity and disease across the life course. Focusing on early-life and chronic exposures—especially arsenic and heavy metal mixtures—her work examines impacts on vaccine responses, infection and cancer risk, and neuroinflammatory pathways tied to neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative outcomes. She also leads a study characterizing the exposome in relation to childhood asthma in Baltimore City.
At CAAT, she directs the metabolomics lab and chairs the International Developmental Immunotoxicity (DIT) Working Group to accelerate new approach methodologies (NAMs) for immune safety—part of her broader leadership in the CAAT Implementation Moonshot Project for Alternative Chemical Testing (IMPACT) aimed at modernizing chemical testing with human-relevant science. She also leads the IMPACT Exposome Program, aimed at realizing the Human Exposome Project, by developing practical tools and infrastructures for the field, including the tidyexposomics R toolkit, and advancing “ exposome intelligence” — integrating AI with exposomics to accelerate discovery and translation for precision public health and medicine.
Within NEXUS, Dr. Sillé co-leads the JHU Collaborative Hub of the NIEHS U24 Coordinating Center for Exposome Research, helping build the infrastructure and community needed to bring AI-driven exposomics into biomedical research and practice. In collaboration with NEXUS, she recently led the organization of the Exposome Moonshot Forum, gathering diverse stakeholders (including governments, organizations, scientists, funders, the technology sector and the public) and fostering global dialogue and collaborations around exposome-informed health policy and practices. This led to the Washington, D.C. Declaration on the Human Exposome and the formation of the Global Exposome Forum, a growing international consortium dedicated to realization of the Human Exposome Project.
Fun Fact: When time allows—rarely, with three little kids and a busy career—Fenna, a native of dushi Curaçao, loves to sew her own clothes.
