Our Team

CARERC Director

Wayne Sanderson, Ph.D., CIH

Growing up, Dr. Sanderson worked on his family’s grain and cattle farms in Graves and Carlisle Counties, Kentucky. He and his wife Karen manage a small farm near Lexington, Kentucky. He knows firsthand the many demographic, economic, psycho-social, and health and safety issues facing farm-rural families. Dr. Sanderson is an instructional and research leader in the Martin-Gatton College of Agriculture, Food, and Environment and the College of Public Health, and is collaborator with faculty in several other colleges and universities. In 2017, Dr. Sanderson moved from serving as Deputy Director of Southeast Center for Agricultural Health and Injury Prevention (SCAHIP) to become the Director. Previously, Dr. Sanderson was the Director of the University of Iowa’s NIOSH-funded Great Plains Center for Agricultural Health and Director of the University of Iowa’s Industrial Hygiene Core training program within the Heartland ERC. From 1978 to 2002, Dr. Sanderson worked for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) as a research Industrial Hygienist and Epidemiologist for the Division of Respiratory Disease Studies in Morgantown, West Virginia and the Division of Surveillance, Hazard Evaluations, and Field Studies in Cincinnati, Ohio--culminating with his position as Chief of the Industrial Hygiene Section in the Industrywide Studies Branch.

With his extensive industrial hygiene and epidemiology experience, especially in occupational exposures and health and injury risks, Dr. Sanderson coordinates all aspects of the CARERC. He recruits and advises students, leads courses and seminars, and is a mentor to students as they complete their thesis and dissertation research projects. Dr. Sanderson leads both curriculum development and faculty recruitment. The research projects of his many students cover a very broad range of topics including epidemiology, exposure assessment, and risk assessment.

Steve Browning, MSPH, PhD

Dr. Browning is an Associate Professor of Epidemiology in the College of Public Health and serves as the Deputy Director of the NIOSH-funded Central Appalachian Regional Education and Research Center (CARERC) and directs the Occupational Epidemiology Core. In addition, he serves as the Director of Emerging Issues and Surveillance for the Southeast Center for Agricultural Health and Injury Prevention. He has more than 30 years of experience in conducting public health surveillance, cohort studies, and the analysis of large secondary datasets. His research interests are in occupational, injury, and environmental epidemiology and has conducted large-scale population-based research projects on agricultural health concerns among farmers and farm families in the state of Kentucky. In 2020, along with colleagues from the University of Kentucky, he completed a 5-year grant (R01ES024771-01) from the NIEHS titled “Community-engaged research & action to reduce respiratory disease in Appalachia: The Mountain Air Project (MAP)”.  This project afforded several of our doctoral and masters students the opportunity to work on a large environmental epidemiology study, two of which used the experience for their PhD dissertations. 

He has substantial teaching and administration obligations related to the curriculum in the College of Public Health.  He served as the Director of Graduate Studies (DGS) for the PhD program in Epidemiology and Biostatistics from 2013-2018 and currently serves as the DGS for the newly created MS in Epidemiology, which is one of the degree offerings for the occupational epidemiology core. In this role, he has oversight and authority to monitor the curriculum and has responsibilities for recruitment, admissions, changes to curriculum through program proposals, compliance with CEPH competencies and assessment, and tracking of students through graduation.  His expertise is in the design and analysis of occupational health studies and he currently teaches courses in Study Design (CPH 714) for PhD students; Occupational and Environmental Epidemiology (CPH 617) and Introduction to Epidemiology (CPH 605) in our master’s programs (MS and MPH). In addition, he teaches the MS thesis course and the doctoral seminar.  He is currently chairing the dissertation committees of 6 PhD students and 4 masters students, and has advised over 200 graduate students for doctoral dissertations and master’s theses in his career.

Meet the Team