SPH-B interim Executive Associate Dean Grace Sembajwe and her mentee and postdoctoral fellow at Northwell Health Sundus Siddique are at the forefront of creating safer environments for construction workers nationwide.
Sembajwe worked with Siddique to secure a grant of $19,971 through the North Carolina Occupational Safety and Health Education and Research Center (NC OSHERC) for the research project “A Novel Approach to Quantifying Occupational Asbestos Exposure: Development and Validation of a Comprehensive Index Using the Occupational Lung Registry Program Data for Construction Trade Workers.”
The idea for the project stemmed from long-standing concerns about asbestos exposure among trade workers and the long-term lung health implications. Under the mentorship of Sembajwe and co-investigators Anne Golden and Jacqueline Moline, Siddique worked on addressing a research gap in task-specific exposure assessment that led to this project, developing and validating a screening tool for asbestos workers in The Occupational Lung Registry at Northwell Health. For several decades, this Registry has been conducting comprehensive medical monitoring for individuals at continued risk of occupational exposures to asbestos, building on the pioneering legacy of Irving Selikoff, according to Sembajwe.
“Assessing asbestos risk has long been hampered by the complex realities of changing roles within a job and evolving exposure conditions,” shares Siddique. “The screening tool will pave the way for better identification of at-risk workers, stronger disease surveillance, and potential improvements to public health intervention.”
Once developed, the algorithm will be applicable to other industries, which will make a dramatic impact on public health as “a fair proportion of trade workers showed patterns of pulmonary function abnormality indicative of restrictive, obstructive, and mixed lung disease, suggesting evidence of asbestos exposure related disease,” according to preliminary data analyses.
The grant runs through June 30 of this year which makes for a tight research timeline, but Sembajwe says thanks to the work of Siddique, much of the preliminary subject screening, data cleaning and repository setup has been accomplished, allowing the team to move forward with developing an effective screening tool that will detect changes in job progression as well as historical health conditions. Siddique plans to join the SPH-B team for the 2026-27 academic year.
As an epidemiologist and industrial hygienist, Sembajwe says mentoring and working with Siddique and developing this important screening model has been a gratifying experience.
“I am thrilled to be working with Dr. Siddique on these groundbreaking job exposure matrices, a detailed aspect of causal modeling that is extremely challenging to pursue, yet highly impactful when mapped successfully,” says Sembajwe. “Dr. Siddique deserves the highest of praise in combining her clinical skills as a trained physician, reviewing medical and radiological reports, with epidemiological and biostatistical analyses.”
Co-investigator Moline echoes Sembajwe’s sentiments, stating Siddique’s work “will be instrumental in defining job tasks among various construction trades in order to better understand the risks associated with this work, and has the potential to be translatable for use with other toxicant exposures in the future.”
Golden adds, "With this research, Dr. Siddique will leverage clinical data as well as individual level exposure data to develop and validate a quantitative asbestos exposure index which, as recognized by the reviewers, has widespread applicability."
Sembajwe and Siddique are looking forward to the next steps in exposure modeling and tool development at SPH-B.
Read more about SPH-B faculty, staff, and students making a difference at go.iu.edu/48bx.