John Peters, M.D.

Professor and Director of Occupational & Environmental Medicine, Department of Preventive Medicine, University of Southern California School of Medicine

Dr. John Peters was the Hastings Professor and Director of the Division of Environmental Health in the Department of Preventive Medicine at the University of Southern California. He was the principal investigator of the Children's Health Study, which has followed 11,000 children in Southern California communities to learn the effects of air pollution on the health of their lungs. Dr. Peters was also the principal investigator of a NIEHS-funded program project to continue to follow these children into adulthood.

Dr. Peters directed the Southern California Environmental Health Sciences Center for 10 years, a NIEHS-supported center based at the University of Southern California, including faculty members from both UCLA and USC. The Center focuses on the full range of environmental health problems that humans face and trying to understand how host factors and environmental exposures interact to produce human disease.

Over the span of his career, Dr. Peters published over 150 research papers, reports and chapters on subjects such as the health effects of air pollution, magnetic fields, asbestos, vinyl chloride and other chemicals in both the work and general environment.

Dr. John Peters passed away in January 2010.