Shanna Swan

Shanna Helen Swan (born May 1936)[1] is an American environmental and reproductive epidemiologist who is Professor of Environmental Medicine and Public Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where she has taught since April 2011.[2] She is known for her research on environmental contributions to sperm count and the male infertility crisis.

Shanna Swan
Born
Shanna Helen Swan

May 1936 (1936-05) (age 87)
Pennsylvania, United States
Other namesHelen Wittenberg
Education
Spouses
  • ​
    (divorced)​
  • Steven R. Brown
Children
  • Joshua Freedman
  • Deborah Freedman Lustig
  • Christo Swan
Scientific career
FieldsEnvironmental epidemiology
Institutions
ThesisLimiting Distributions of Random Sums of Independent Random Variables (1963)
Doctoral advisorLucien Marie Le Cam

Early life

Swan was born in Pennsylvania, United States.[1] Her father, Rudolph Wittenberg, was German Jewish, and her mother, Goldie Ray Polturak, was American.[1] She studied mathematics with a minor in logic at the City College of New York. She studied for her master's degree at Columbia University, working with Polish biostatistician Agnes Berger. She completed her doctorate in statistics at the University of California, Berkeley.[1]

Career

After completing her doctorate, Swan worked for insurance company Kaiser Permanente investigating links between the contraceptive pill and conditions such as cervical cancer. She later worked for the California Department of Public Health, studying unexplained miscarriages in Santa Clara County. Swan joined a National Academy of Sciences committee in 1995 to research the impact of "hormonally active agents in the environment" and a Danish study claiming to reveal a dramatic drop in sperm counts between 1938 and 1991. She later worked at the University of Missouri and the University of Rochester.[1]

She is Professor of Environmental Medicine and Public Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where she has taught since April 2011.[2]

In 2017, a paper Swan co-authored on environmental contributions to sperm count and the male infertility crisis[3] received significant attention in both the popular media and scholarly literature, becoming the world's 26th most referenced scientific paper published that year. She has also researched the effects of environmental chemicals and pharmaceutical drugs on the development of the human reproductive tract.[4][5]

In 2021, with journalist Stacey Colino, Swan co-authored the book Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, Threatening Sperm Counts, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race, which discusses declining sperm counts in men and attributes this decline to endocrine-disrupting chemicals.[6]

Personal life

Swan was the first wife of David A. Freedman, with whom she had two children: Joshua Freedman and Deborah Freedman Lustig.[7][8] She later married Steven R. Brown. She has a third child, Christo Swan.

References
  1. Neville, Sarah (June 22, 2023). "Global sperm counts are falling. This scientist believes she knows why". Financial Times. Archived from the original on June 22, 2023. Retrieved June 22, 2023.
  2. "Top Reproductive Epidemiologist, Joins the Mount Sinai Children's Environmental Health Center". Mount Sinai Health System (Press release). April 5, 2011. Retrieved October 1, 2021.
  3. Hagai Levine; Niels Jørgensen; Anderson Martino-Andrade; Jaime Mendiola; Dan Weksler-Derri; Irina Mindlis; Rachel Pinotti; Shanna H Swan (November–December 2017) [July 25, 2017]. "Temporal trends in sperm count: a systematic review and meta-regression analysis". Human Reproduction Update. 23 (6): 646–659. doi:10.1093/humupd/dmx022. PMC 6455044. PMID 28981654.
  4. "About - Dr. Shanna Swan". Dr. Shanna Swan. Retrieved October 1, 2021.
  5. Corbyn, Zoë (March 28, 2021). "Shanna Swan: 'Most couples may have to use assisted reproduction by 2045'". The Guardian. Retrieved October 1, 2021.
  6. Trivedi, Bijal P. (March 5, 2021). "The Everyday Chemicals That Might Be Leading Us to Our Extinction". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved October 1, 2021.
  7. "In Memory of David A. Freedman". University of California, Berkeley. Retrieved October 1, 2021.
  8. "David A. Freedman". University of California Senate. Retrieved October 1, 2021.


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