Catherine Pirkle

Catherine Pirkle is a Professor of Public Health at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Trained in both life-course and environmental epidemiology, she has worked for two decades in the field of women’s health. Her research has brought her to West Africa, where she completed several projects evaluating interventions to reduce maternal and perinatal mortality. She has also spent over a decade examining pivotal reproductive health milestones across the life-course—age at first birth, lifetime childbirths, age and type of menopause—and their associations with chronic disease, frailty, and mobility disability. Her training in environmental epidemiology has brought her to the Canadian Arctic, Bermuda and Colombia where she conducted research and provided technical assistance to better document and understand the impacts of environmental contamination on food security and ultimately, the health of pregnant women and their children. She has extended this research to Pacific region and has current projects in Hawaiʻi on marine pollution, food security, and manmade and natural disasters.