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Rager Lab

Julia E. Rager, PhD, MSEE

Julia Rager is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering (ESE) at the University of North Carolina (UNC)’s Gillings School of Global Public Health. 

 

 

 

Research Interests

The overarching goal of our research is to unravel relationships between environmental exposures and health outcomes, with a focus on complex mixtures at growing prevalence in the environment. We uniquely address this goal by coupling advanced in silico methods with molecular toxicology approaches to evaluate environmental mixtures. Major themes of our current research include the following: 

  1. Mixtures modeling to identify ‘bad actors’ in the atmosphere. 
  2. Evaluating extracellular vesicles as novel mediators of human disease 
  3. Translating exposure science and toxicology into risk assessment and policy decision making. 
  4. Developing and disseminating training for computational research in environmental health 

For more information surrounding the Rager Lab’s research, team members, and background, please see her team’s parent website (link to: https://tarheels.live/ragerlab/) 

 

Current Lab Personnel

Hadley Hartwell, MS, Laboratory Manager 
Kyle Roell, PhD, Data Analyst and Project Manager 
Alexis Payton, MS, Research Data Analyst 
Celeste Carberry, PhD, Research Program Manager 

 

Post-Doctoral Fellows 
Elise Hickman, PhD, Postdoctoral Research 
Jessie Chappel, PhD, Postdoctoral Research 

Doctoral Trainees 
Lauren Koval, Graduate Student 
Sarah Miller, Graduate Student 
Chloe Chou, Graduate Student 
Allison Spring, Graduate Student 

Undergraduate Students 
Victoria Carberry, Undergraduate Student 
Ellie Jiang, Undergraduate Student 
Kai Malone, Undergraduate Student 
Raquel Winker, Undergraduate Student 

 

Lab Alumni 

PhD Students
Celeste Carberry, PhD 2024 

Masters Students 
Elena McDermott, MSPH 2023 
Alexis Payton, MS 2021 

Undergraduate Students 
Lauren Simendinger, 2023 
Deepak Keshava, 2022 
Toby Turla, 2021 
Alexis Payton, 2022 
Celeste Carbery, 2020 

 

Publications

To see a complete list of Dr. Julia E. Rager’s publications, see her Google Scholar (link: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=CUX9888AAAAJ&hl=en)  or PubMed listing (link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/myncbi/julia.rager.1/bibliography/56375750/public/?sortby=pubDate&sdirection=descending) 

Example key publications relevant to CEMALB initiatives include the following: 

 

  1. Winker R*, Payton A#, Brown E, McDermott E*, Freedman JH, Lenhardt C, Eaves LE, Fry RC, Rager JE++. Wildfires and Climate Justice: Future Wildfire Events Predicted to Disproportionally Impact Socioeconomically Vulnerable Communities in North Carolina. Front Public Health. 2024 Apr 29;12:1339700. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2024.1339700. PMID: 38741908; PMCID: PMC11089107. 
  2. Vitucci E, Carberry CK*, Payton A#, Herring LE, Mordant AL, McCullough SD, Rager JE++. Characterizing the Extracellular Vesicle Proteomic Landscape of the Human Airway Using In Vitro Organotypic Multi-Cellular Models. Cell – iScience. 2023 Oct 10;26(11):108162. doi: 10.1016/ j.isci.2023.108162. PMID: 37920665. PMCID: PMC10618692. 
  3. Payton A#, Roell KR, Rebuli ME, Valdar W, Jaspers I, Rager JE++. Navigating the bridge between wet and dry lab toxicology research to address current challenges with high-dimensional data. Front Toxicol. 2023 May 26:5:1171175. doi: 10.3389/ftox.2023.1171175. PMID: 37304253; PMCID: PMC10250703 
  4. Carberry CK*, Rager JE++. The Impact of Environmental Contaminants on Extracellular Vesicles and their Key Molecular Regulators: A Literature and Database-Driven Review. Environ Mol Mutagen. 2023 Jan;64(1):50-66. doi: 10.1002/em.22522. PMID: 36502378. PMCID: PMC10798145. 
  5. Kim YH, Rager JE, Jaspers I, Gilmour MI. Computational Approach to Link Chemicals in Anthropogenic Smoke Particulate Matter with Toxicity. Chem Res Toxicol. 2022 Dec 19;35(12):2210-2213. doi: 10.1021/acs.chemrestox.2c00270. PMID: 36373932. 
  6. Koval LE*, Carberry CK*, Kim YH, McDermott E*, Hartwell H, Jaspers I, Gilmour MI, Rager JE++. Wildfire Variable Toxicity: Identifying Biomass Smoke Exposure Groupings through Transcriptomic Similarity Scoring. Environ Sci Technol. 2022 Dec 6;56(23):17131-17142. doi: 10.1021/acs.est.2c06043. PMID: 36399130. PMCID: PMC10777820. 
  7. Carberry CK*, Koval LE*, Payton A#, Hartwell H, Ho Kim Y, Smith GJ, Reif DM, Jaspers I, Ian Gilmour M, Rager JE++. Wildfires and extracellular vesicles: Exosomal microRNAs as mediators of cross-tissue cardiopulmonary responses to biomass smoke. Environ Int. 2022 Sep;167:107419. doi: 10.1016/j.envint.2022.107419. PMID: 35863239; PMCID: PMC9389917. 
  8. Carberry CK*, Keshava D*, Payton A#, Smith GJ, Rager JE++. Approaches to incorporate extracellular vesicles into exposure science, toxicology, and public health research. J Expo Sci Environ Epidemiol. 2022 Sep;32(5):647-659. doi: 10.1038/s41370-022-00417-w. PMID: 35217808; PMCID: PMC9402811. 
  9. Roell K#, Koval LE*, Boyles R, Patlewicz G, Ring C, Rider CV, Ward-Caviness C, Reif DM, Jaspers I, Fry RC, Rager JE++. Development of the InTelligence And Machine LEarning (TAME) Toolkit for Introductory Data Science, Chemical-Biological Analyses, Predictive Modeling, and Database Mining for Environmental Health Research. Front Toxicol. 2022 Jun 22;4:893924. doi: 10.3389/ftox.2022.893924. PMID: 35812168; PMCID: PMC9257219. 
  10. Rager JE, Clark J, Eaves LA, Avula V, Niehoff NM, Kim YH, Jaspers I, Gilmour MI. Mixtures modeling identifies chemical inducers versus repressors of toxicity associated with wildfire smoke. Sci Total Environ. 2021 Jun 25;775:145759. PMID: 33611182. PMCID: PMC8243846.