This week, Lauren welcomes UI College of Public Health alumnus Dr. Vijay Golla, associate professor and director of the public health campus at Texas A&M San Antonio. They discuss the gaps in protective practices for workers, the impact of pesticide exposures, and how global experiences shape local solutions.

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the student hosts, guests, and contributors, and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the University of Iowa or the College of Public Health.

Lauren Lavin:

Hello everybody and welcome back to Plugged in to Public Health. Today we’re diving into the world of occupational and environmental health with Dr. Golla, associate professor and director of the public health campus at Texas A&M San Antonio. From his roots in clinical medicine in India to his PhD in industrial hygiene at the University of Iowa, Dr. Golla brings a global and deeply practical perspective to the evolving field of public health. In this conversation, we’re going to explore the gaps in protective practices for workers, real world impact of pesticide exposure on farm families, and how global experiences shape local solutions.

I’m Lauren Lavin, and if it’s your first time with us, welcome. We’re a student-run podcast that talks about major issues in public health and how they’re relevant to anyone, both in and outside the field of public health. Now, let’s get Plugged in to Public Health. Plugged in to Public Health is produced and edited by the students of the University of Iowa College of Public Health, and the views expressed in this podcast are solely those of the student hosts, guests, and contributors. They do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the University of Iowa or the College of Public Health.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the podcast today, and today we have Dr. Golla speaking with us, which I’m really excited about. So thank you for being here. And we are going to start off by, I’m just going to have you tell us about your journey into the field of public health and what inspired you to pursue a PhD in industrial hygiene here at the University of Iowa.

Vijay Golla:

Well, thank you for having me. I started my education in medicine, and as a medical student itself, I was very much interested in preventive medicine and social medicine. So when I graduated, I worked briefly as a general practitioner, and at that time, I got even more interested in preventive medicine and public health. That is what led me to pursue a PhD in industrial hygiene at the University of Iowa. This is because I was very much interested in exposures, how do exposures happen and how does that cause disease? And I was looking at a lot of occupational and environmental health diseases and also worker health and safety. So those are the things that influenced me to pursue my PhD here.

Lauren Lavin:

Yeah, and so when you said you went to medical school, was that here in the US or was that back in-

Vijay Golla:

It was in India.

Lauren Lavin:

Then how did you get interested specifically in industrial hygiene in the sense that, which diseases… Did you see certain diseases?

Vijay Golla:

Right. Yes. There was a lot of exposure to chemicals, and there was a lot of cancers that are caused by those chemicals that workers were getting exposed to. The utilization of personal protective equipment was very low, and even those that are using PPE are not using it correctly. So there was a big gap in terms of having PPE available and also to have the information to use it correctly and all the other practices that go with it in terms of behaviors, and that can lead to exposures. That’s a big gap that I’ve seen.

Lauren Lavin:

Yeah. Did you know that you wanted to do a PhD in the US or did you explore options in India as well?

Vijay Golla:

At that time, there was only one Institute for Public Health and Hygiene in India, because of which my options were very limited. So I had to come outside of India. After I graduated from the University of Iowa, there was a big public health initiative in India that established an Indian Institute for Public Health in seven major cities throughout the country, became a national mandate. That was not there when I was there.

Lauren Lavin:

So that was a little bit after your time.

Vijay Golla:

Yes, yes.

Lauren Lavin:

Moving on to your dissertation work that you did here at the University of Iowa. When I was looking that stuff up, I saw that it focused on the assessment of pesticide levels and related doses among farm families in Iowa. So what initially drew you to that topic specifically, and what were some of the findings of that initial research you did?

Vijay Golla:

Yeah. The topic came into play because of my prior work in Kentucky on pesticides. I was looking at atrazine, which is a herbicide that is widely used in corn and soybean production, and those concentrations were very, very high in Kentucky where there’s a lot of corn and soybean grown. So I was looking at pesticides, and then when I came to the University of Iowa, that was an area of interest of mine, and I saw that to be an opportunity that I can connect to my prior work, and that led me to the topic of assessment of pesticide levels in farm homes in Iowa.

Lauren Lavin:

How does that connect to the genetically modified organisms in food GMOs? Do you have any opinions on that from your previous work?

Vijay Golla:

Yeah, yeah. GMOs, they do play a major role. That’s a big field in the world of agriculture. And while that’s something that is pursued heavily, at the same time, there’s a lot of awareness on GMO and the desire to basically pursue food materials that are non-GMO. So there’s that too. I specifically did not look into the GMO when I was looking at pesticides. However, that was a big area that was happening simultaneously when I was doing this work.

Lauren Lavin:

How did your experience at the University of Iowa shape your early career, and are there any moments or mentors that really stand out as influential as you think back on that?

Vijay Golla:

Yes. My experiences at the University of Iowa were very influential in shaping my early career. Some of the things that I learned here in the classroom, out in the field from the faculty and staff here, to be very positive, to be assertive, to be thorough, and to also be able to work in high-demand situations. There were times when things were very stressful, not just from homework, but from other things. And also, industrial hygiene is one area, but overall, the field of public health and overall meeting my professional growth, the university played a major role. The individuals that come to my mind that served as mentors, Patrick O’Shaughnessy, Wayne Sanderson, Lar Fuortes, Fred Gerr, I learned a lot from their classes and from knowing them and working with them and more than they will ever realize.

Lauren Lavin:

After you graduated, you ended up going back to Western Kentucky University, and that’s where you had gotten your master’s originally.

Vijay Golla:

Correct.

Lauren Lavin:

So one of your achievements there was obtaining a training grant to support undergrad students in environmental health sciences. What impact did this grant have on students, as well as the department you were working on?

Vijay Golla:

Yeah. The training grant was critical. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC, has a major unit called NISOH, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and NIOSH provides this training grant. NIOSH has 18 ERCs in the country. University of Iowa is one of them. But it has 30 training project grants is what they’re called, TPGs. So Western Kentucky had one of them. So that was initially for undergraduate students, and I was working with a faculty member to bring that back. The program had TPG support for a number of years, and then, when a faculty member left, it went silent. So then we resurrected that funding. And then we added the master’s for graduate students too to get that training grant. That effort I personally led and that provided tuition support to students conference, travel, workshops. It also helped us recruit students. It took off a lot of expense burden on students for their education because of that. We also were very successful in increasing the number of female students in the program through that training grant.

Lauren Lavin:

Yeah, which is great.

Vijay Golla:

Which was very wonderful. So it had a profound impact on the two undergraduate and graduate programs.

Lauren Lavin:

Right. Since 2015, you’ve taken on quite a few leadership roles throughout your academic tenure, first as associate dean for research and administration at WKU, and now as the Vice Provost for Research and Health Sciences at Texas A&M. How do you feel like these roles have enabled you to make a broader impact in the field of public health?

Vijay Golla:

Yes. I was able to work with the faculty and staff and build programs. It was a very dynamic environment as opposed to having just static programs. So because we were building programs both at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and the department had public health education programs and then environmental occupational health programs and specifically impacting rural areas, and that was one of the biggest things. The broader impact, I would say, is to be able to serve underserved populations and to have students come from families that they’re the first generation students. I had a lot of students that were first generation, about 70 to 80%.

Lauren Lavin:

In Kentucky?

Vijay Golla:

In Kentucky. And a lot of students were coming from places they don’t even have a hospital or any type of primary care facility type thing. So it was a big deal in terms of impacting those areas.

Lauren Lavin:

Yeah. I was in Kentucky this summer for the first time, and I was really surprised by the level of poverty that we saw everywhere. So the first generation thing, I would say falls in line with even my own, albeit short experience in Kentucky this last summer. So now you’re the vice provost at Texas A&M. Did you always know that you wanted to be an admin versus a teaching and research side?

Vijay Golla:

No. No. It just happened. An opportunity came up when I was at Western Kentucky, and the dean was very interested in appointing me as associate dean for research, and that started that trajectory. And I did well in that job. I took it as an experiment, but it went well.

Lauren Lavin:

So then you had to keep doing it.

Vijay Golla:

And then I had to keep doing it, right? So then when I went to Texas A&M and became vice provost, the biggest impact reward that I had was increasing the amount of research and number of grants at the university, and it has grown in the last three years about more than 100% per year. The challenges are in an administrative role like this, is to keep staff. After we train them, and they have some years of experience, to keep them, because where I am in Texas, they are very marketable. When you have eight universities in the same city, you don’t have to move houses. You just change the road that you drive on to work. So it’s very hard. So I lost some staff over time. That is the challenging part, but I’ve also acquired staff from other places to my unit. Another challenge is expanding research compliance as part of my job with research. So that’s the-

Lauren Lavin:

What does research compliance mean?

Vijay Golla:

Okay. Every university has a requirement to follow the federal guidelines, and then you have state guidelines to be in compliance when you’re doing research. Whether it’s human subjects or animal models that you’re using or utilizing biological organisms, those studies have to be approved by a board that is constituted by the faculty and some community members from that region. So in a nutshell, you have IRB institutional [inaudible 00:13:02].

Lauren Lavin:

Yes. Everyone knows about IRB.

Vijay Golla:

IRB, right? And then you have IBC, Institutional Biosafety Committee, Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, IACUC. So those are the three main components of research compliance.

Lauren Lavin:

So do you oversee all of those?

Vijay Golla:

I oversee that. There’s an Office of Research compliance that reports to me, but at the end of the day, I serve as the institutional official, so I am responsible.

Lauren Lavin:

Got it. And then, have you found anything to be particularly rewarding about your time as vice provost at Texas A&M?

Vijay Golla:

Yes. To be able to build things, network and grow capacity, especially more recently, to build the health science initiative, to be the lead person on that, to bring different players together to make that happen, that is the most rewarding thing because I can see what the initiative will be 5, 10, 15 years from now and how that would impact the population of that region in a positive way.

Lauren Lavin:

Yeah, absolutely. What advice would you give to current public health students or young professionals who are interested in following a path similar to yours?

Vijay Golla:

I would say work hard in your classes. Do your coursework well. Definitely embark on field experiences. Like I shared before, don’t pass up on any field experience opportunity. Networking is the other thing. Stay focused. Have fun, but stay focused, and keep your research active is what I would say because even though I moved into administration, I stayed research active and grant active, however difficult that may be. I have less time to do it, but that is one thing that keeps me going, so that’s what I would say.

Lauren Lavin:

Those are good bits of advice. Okay. My final question for you is what excites you most about the future of public health, and where do you see this field heading in the next decade?

Vijay Golla:

The most exciting thing about the future of public health is it’s a field that is growing in its application, not just its size. Most things are becoming public health-oriented. We have seen the pandemic and we have seen the success and the failures of the pandemic during the pandemic. So we’ve learned a lot of things-

Lauren Lavin:

Absolutely.

Vijay Golla:

… because of that experience. However, it’s a growing field. And where I see this heading in the next decade, I think there will be a critical role that public health will play in prevention of diseases more than on the therapeutic side. There’ll be big headway in the preventive side.

Lauren Lavin:

Which is important. We would prefer it to be on the preventive side than addressing a problem after it’s occurred.

Vijay Golla:

This is one thing I’ll say. There are certain vehicles that you can take the key fob and you can put the key fob and they can tell you the status of your vehicle, right?

Lauren Lavin:

Yeah.

Vijay Golla:

When you got it serviced last, what problems you have, had or have. I have a feeling that public health is going to play that role. So we go in for whatever care that they are able to pull things up and give us advice, give us the necessary healthcare options based on where we were before, what we’re doing now. I think that role will be played by public health, not by traditional medicine.

Lauren Lavin:

Yeah, which is something I think to look forward to as we keep going. One, it keeps job security up.

Vijay Golla:

That’s right. Yeah, absolutely.

Lauren Lavin:

But two, it’s probably a better way to do medicine.

Vijay Golla:

Yes.

Lauren Lavin:

Well, I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today. I really enjoyed this, and I hope our listeners enjoyed and learned something from it too.

Vijay Golla:

Thank you so much for this opportunity.

Lauren Lavin:

That’s it for our episode this week. A big thank you to Dr. Golla for joining us and sharing his journey from medical school in India to pesticide exposure research in the Midwest, and ultimately his commitment to training the next generation of environmental health professionals. From this conversation, we hope you take away some key lessons, the importance of preventive thinking in medicine and public health, how meaningful mentorship can shape your career, and the value of connecting classroom learning with real world practice. Whether you’re early in your career or thinking about what’s next, Dr. Golla’s story reminds us that public health is a global dynamic and deeply impactful field.

This episode was hosted and written by Lauren Lavin and edited and produced by Lauren Lavin. You can learn more about the University of Iowa College of Public Health on Facebook. Our podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and SoundCloud. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to help support the podcast, please share it with your colleagues, friends, or anyone interested in public health. Have a suggestion for our team? You can reach us at cph-gradambassador@uiowa.edu. This episode was brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. Until next week, stay healthy, stay curious, and take care.