When Majid Bagheri Hosseinabadi, a former instructor at Shahroud University of Medical Science in Iran, took his occupational health students on a field trip to a nearby electrical power plant in 2016, the workers told him about a strange phenomenon: Overwhelmingly, they said, workers at the plant tended to have daughters, while very few had sons. The offhand comment intrigued Hosseinabadi, who was then a researcher and lecturer, and inspired him to design a study testing the potential link between the workers’ occupational exposures and the mysterious biological phenomena.
“We knew that these workers were regularly exposed to high-intensity, extremely low-frequency electromagnetic fields, which are classified as possibly carcinogenic to humans by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and are also associated with something called oxidative stress, which can damage DNA and other macromolecules, leading to a range of health issues,” Hosseinabadi said. “But no one had previously investigated the possible mechanisms in which exposure to these fields could also lead to a biological increase in female offspring.”
To find out, Hosseinabadi designed a randomized controlled trial, giving the power plant workers vitamin C and vitamin E for three months to test whether antioxidant vitamins could blunt the physiological damage caused by their exposure. The results showed clear protective effects—especially from vitamin E, which consistently reduced DNA damage biomarkers in white blood cells among the power plant workers. In addition to a successful intervention to protect power plant employees, the study also convinced Hosseinabadi that he wanted to advance his research career in occupational health.
So after six years of research and teaching in Iran, Hosseinabadi undertook a global search for an occupational hygiene PhD program—a process that led him to the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. “I wanted a new challenge, to improve my research skills and expand my creativity,” he recalled. “The School of Public Health’s occupational hygiene program has faculty members that are well known not only here but across the world,” Hosseinabadi said, making it an easy choice for his next chapter.
Shortly after his arrival in 2022, Hosseinabadi got a quick introduction to the kind of hands-on, innovative research that goes on at the University. “I was part of a team of researchers led by my supervisor, Dr Susan Arnold that went to the Minnesota State Fair,” he said. Still in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Hosseinabadi and other occupational hygiene researchers conducted interviews at the UMN Driven to Discover booth, where they had fairgoers try on N95 respirators for fit testing to evaulate the effects of gender, age, race, facial dimensions, and hairstyles on passing the fit test. (One notable takeaway; men with full beards consistently had the lowest fit test scores).
Since then, Hosseinabadi has completed his coursework and is now focusing on a primary area of research—the factors influencing the transmission of airborne and bacteria in animal agriculture settings. Working closely with SPH Professor Peter Raynor, Hosseinabadi takes air samples using direct-reading devices to measure particle and gas concentrations in Minnesota swine facilities to help ensure the workplaces are safe for the workers who spend hours a day in them. Placing the devices on tripods (to measure air in the “breathing zone” where worker’s faces are) inside a swine facility, Hosseinabadi measures gases such as carbon dioxide, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, and volatile organic compounds, along with particle counts and concentrations in different size fractions to assess whether the air quality accords with occupational limits set by agencies like OSHA. He is also responsible for evaluating ventilation system performance in swine facilities by measuring air change rates to assess the role of ventilation systems in workers’ exposures.
Using the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s hierarchy of controls—a five-step system that ranks methods for protecting workers from workplace hazards—the SPH team then uses their measurements and other observations to make recommendations to the operators of swine facilities.
“We try to design solutions that don’t depend only on workers wearing personal protective equipment [PPE] such as respirators for eight hours straight,” he explained. “Ideally, we’re recommending more sustainable solutions like improvements to the ventilation system, or management solutions like limiting the amount of time a worker is allowed to spend in a work area with high pollutant concentrations. Solutions like those are more effective and can ensure worker’s safety in the longer term,” he said.
After completing his PhD, Hosseinabadi plans to remain in the U.S. to teach, continue researching hidden workplace hazards, and designing novel interventions that will protect workers and make their workplaces safer.
