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Georgia Kayser, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Global and Environmental Health in the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health at University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and Deputy Director of the UC Global Health Institute Center for Planetary Health. Her environmental health research focuses on adolescent and children’s environmental health, water quality, environmental determinants of risk, and environmental health inequities and disparities. In her research she has explored the factors that limit access to safe and sustainable drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene (WaSH) services, globally; identified environmental determinants of risk, including pesticide and microbiological contaminants in drinking water; and examined environmental health disparities that result from gender, racial/ethnic, and geographic inequities. This research informs environmental health programs and policy. Her methodological expertise is in the use of cross-sectional studies to explore WaSH risk factors for disease across countries, formative research to identify interventions, experimental and quasi-experimental methods to test specific interventions, and geospatial analysis to understand patterns of exposure. She has conducted research in over 20 countries across the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia with funding from government, international organization, and private sector sources.

Dr. Kayser is currently working on a NIEHS funded K01 career award that explores pesticide exposures, mental health and endocrine disruption among children growing up near pesticide spray sites in Ecuador. She is also working on a NIDA funded study of WaSH access among people who inject drugs, many of whom are unhoused, and live on the US-Mexico border between Tijuana, and San Diego. Dr. Kayser enjoys mentoring students in her research and teaching environmental and global health courses at UCSD.

Prior to UCSD, Dr. Kayser was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of North Carolina in the Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering in the Gillings School of Global Public Health. She holds a PhD from The Fletcher School at Tufts University where she concentrated in Development Economics and has a B.S. in Policy Analysis from Cornell University.