We are concerned with environmental epidemiology in Parkinson’s disease, aiming to understand how lifelong environmental exposures interact with individual susceptibility to contribute to disease incidence and heterogeneity, including the emerging brain-first and body-first disease trajectories.

We hypothesize that long-term environmental exposures play a major role in disease development and may help explain both the increasing incidence of Parkinson’s disease and its clinical heterogeneity.

We address this by combining nationwide health registries with high-resolution environmental data to reconstruct individual exposure histories across the life course. In parallel, we leverage deeply phenotyped clinical cohorts to characterize disease manifestations in detail and link environmental exposures to clinical subtypes and trajectories. This enables us to study air pollution, pesticides, drinking water contaminants, occupational exposures, and other environmental factors with unprecedented spatial and temporal precision.

By identifying modifiable environmental risk factors and critical exposure windows, we aim to improve our understanding of Parkinson’s disease mechanisms and provide evidence to support prevention strategies that may reduce the future burden of this rapidly growing disease.