Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Professor of Epidemiology

Overview

Dr. Karl Kelsey, MD, MOH, is Professor of Community Health and Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Brown University. He is the founding Director of the Center for Environmental Health and Technology and was the first Head of the Environmental Health Section in the Departemnt of Epidemiology. Dr. Kelsey is interested in the application of laboratory-based biomarkers in environmental disease, with experience in chronic disease epidemiology and tumor biology. The goals of his work include a mechanistic understanding of individual susceptibility to exposure-related cancers. In addition, his laboratory is interested in tumor biology, investigating somatic alterations in tumor tissue from patients who have developed exposure-related cancers. This work involves using an epidemiologic approach to characterize epigenetic and genetic alteration of genes in the causal pathway for malignancy.  Major case control studies that are ongoing in the laboratory include studies designed to understand inherited and acquired susceptibility in head and neck cancers.  The laboratory currently is persuing an interest in using recently developed DNA methylation biomarkers to probe immune profiles from archived blood. The lab sees this as opening a window into the new field of immuno-epidemiology. Dr. Kelsey received his MD from the University of Minnesota and Masters of Occupational Health from Harvard University.

Brown Affiliations