Dr. Masako Morishita, Associate Professor in the Department of Family Medicine, is an environmental exposure science/population health researcher. Dr. Morishita's current research area in exposure science focuses on improving physicochemical characterization of indoor and outdoor airborne particles, quantification of biological burden and biomarkers of trace elements and metals, and emission source identification using receptor modeling - all of which is essential for human/animal exposure assessment and toxicological/epidemiological studies in multidisciplinary environmental health science research projects. She has been the PI of an NIH R01 project ("Reducing Particulate Matter-Associated Cardiovascular Health Effects for Seniors") since 2014, for which she and her collaborators have been conducting community-based intervention clinical trials focusing on the reduction of both personal exposure to PM2.5 and adverse cardiovascular responses.

She completed her PhD at the University of Michigan (UM) School of Public Health. Prior to joining MSU in 2016, she was Research Associate Professor at the UM, where she directed the Trace Metals Laboratory for the UM Environmental Health Sciences Core Center (funded by NIEHS) and also led various exposure assessment tasks in the Great Lakes Air Center for Integrated Environmental Research (GLACIER, funded by EPA). She now directs the newly-constructed MSU Exposure Science Laboratory and seeks to continue extending her future efforts in community-based environmental health research, focusing on interventions with a particular eye toward tackling environmental health disparity issues.