Professional Profile
Rachel Massingill is a scientist in ToxStrategies’ Causation Analysis Practice. She specializes in investigating health outcomes associated with harmful chemical exposures, including per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and organochlorine pesticides, and has experience in conducting exposure assessment. While pursuing her master’s degree at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, Ms. Massingill served as a research assistant in exposomics, and studied the associations between signatures of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) and OCPs (organochlorine pesticides), and their influence on B-cell activating markers that predict the risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. As an environmental and community health researcher, she worked on a National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS)-funded project in which she collected biological samples from a tribal community for biomonitoring of PFAS and flame-retardant chemicals originating from former military sites, and additionally developed a framework for a community-based cancer registry to capture precise rates of cancer morbidity and mortality in those communities. Ms. Massingill is skilled in the use of a variety of software packages for interpreting data, including R and SAS, and she has practical experience in field work as well as in a wide range of laboratory procedures.
Ms. Massingill recently completed her Master of Public Health degree and her thesis addressed predictors of emerging PFAS in U.S. adults. It is the first biomonitoring study to quantify the levels of ultrashort-chain PFAS in a U.S. population.