Vy Kim Nguyen, PhD
Dr. Vy Kim Nguyen is a Broad Reach Environmental Justice Fellow at Silent Spring Institute, where she develops computational approaches to describe the toxicology of consumer products and investigate drivers of disparities in breast cancer incidence and mortality.
Dr. Nguyen earned her MS and PhD in Bioinformatics from the University of Michigan. There, she identified chemicals present at higher levels in vulnerable populations, including women of color, children, and blue-collar workers. Using high-throughput toxicological databases and lab experiments, she collaborated with a team to show that certain harmful chemicals—ones that are more elevated in some communities—can disrupt biological processes linked to conditions like breast cancer and preterm birth, helping explain differences in health outcomes between groups. In parallel, she developed a statistical and visualization framework to map complex, nonlinear relationships between clinical biomarkers and mortality risk, improving clinical risk stratification. This framework can be extended to other environmental exposures and health outcomes.
Dr. Nguyen completed her postdoctoral training in Environmental Health Science and Computational Toxicology at the University of Michigan, as well as in Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. During this time, she harmonized over three decades of U.S. health data to support high-throughput discovery of exposure-disease relationships. Using these data, she showed that body dissatisfaction may lead to an increase in use of personal care products containing benzophenone-3, an endocrine disrupting chemical, among women of color. She also developed a novel method to identify chemicals and exposure levels consistently associated with a higher risk of aggressive cancer. Complementing this work, she designed experiments in an aggressive breast cancer subtype to evaluate how some of these chemicals promote cellular invasion, a hallmark of metastasis.
Dr. Nguyen is dedicated to ensuring that her findings inform and protect communities most affected by chemical exposures and health disparities.
