Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series—Many environmental exposures including lifestyle and endocrine disrupting chemicals have been associated with adverse reproductive outcomes, such as conception delay, infertility and pregnancy loss. However, much of the available evidence focuses only on one partner’s exposures despite many reproductive outcomes being couple dependent (e.g., pregnancy).  On December 5th, Dr. Germaine Buck-Louis will talk about recent findings from the LIFE Study, a population based cohort of couples recruited upon discontinuing contraception for purposes of becoming pregnant and followed through pregnancy or 12 months of trying, to illustrate the discoveries uncovered when studying both partners.  Dr. Buck-Louis will address the feasibility of furthering these cohorts into family based cohorts where early environmental exposures are well characterized and quantified during critical and sensitive windows of human development.

This lecture is sponsored by the Center for Research on Families’ Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series. The Center for Research on Families (CRF) is an endowed interdisciplinary research center in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and College of Natural Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series brings internationally recognized speakers with expertise in family research to campus each year. The lecture series began in 1999 through an endowment established in memory of Tay Gavin Erickson.