Dr. Mei Tessum is an Research Assistant Professor in the Agricultural & Biological Department at UIUC. Her research focuses on air pollution monitoring, environmental exposure modeling, and aerosol measurement and control technology. Specifically, she is interested in developing air quality monitoring strategies to collect high quality air pollution data, and producing accurate air pollution exposure estimates for health studies in both ambient and occupational settings using advanced statistical and machine learning methods. Her research also involves developing new approaches to measure aerosol properties and improving control methods for respirable particles.

Before joining UIUC, Dr. Tessum was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, the University of Washington in Seattle, and a staff epidemiologist at the China National Institute of Environmental Health in Beijing, China. She received a NIEHS traineeship through Biostatistics, Epidemiologic, and Bioinformatic Training in Environmental Health (BEBTEH), University of Washington (2016-2019), and a NIOSH traineeship through Midwest Center for Occupational Health and Safety, University of Minnesota. She also received a data science fellowship at Insight Data Science (2019). Dr. Tessum ’s formal training includes a M.S. and Ph.D. in environmental health with focus in exposure science and industrial hygiene, respectively, from the University of Minnesota, and a medical degree from the Tongji Medical College in Wuhan, China.