Lynne Messer teaches across the educational spectrum, from undergraduate epidemiology, master’s level women’s health, masters and doctoral health and social inequalities, and doctoral research methods.

Her research explores the intersection of social-environmental justice and residential segregation in exacerbating maternal and child health disparities among vulnerable populations. Her early work focused on better characterizing the built and social environments for population-based epidemiologic disparities research. Her later work incorporated other non-social area-level exposures, including air pollution and environmental contaminants, for maternal and child health. In her current work, she seeks to integrate these related environmental factors with research on fetal development and intergenerational transmission to understand the potential for fetal priming to explain the persistence of health disparities among vulnerable subpopulations.