Professor Gump’s specialties include psychosocial factors and their overall effect on health, and more recently, the effects of socioeconomic disadvantage, race, and environmental toxicants (e.g.,lead and mercury) on children and adolescents’ health. His teaching areas include introduction to epidemiology, introduction to psychology, health psychology, research methods/experimental psychology, health promotion, introductory and advanced statistics, behavioral medicine and psychophysiology.

Recognized internationally for his research on cardiovascular disease risk in children, Gump was awarded an R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences earlier this year for the project, “Environmental Toxicants, Race and Cardiovascular Disease Risk in Children.” The study investigates the relationship between race, socioeconomic status, blood lead levels, cardiovascular responses to acute stress and cardiovascular disease risk.

In addition to his ongoing NIH-supported research with children, Gump is currently principal investigator for a grant from the National Science Foundation Research Education for Undergraduate (REU) program, entitled, “Training Veterans to Conduct Trauma Research with Fellow Veterans.”

He serves on the editorial board of two prominent journals in his field,��Psychosomatic Medicine, and Health Psychology, and serves as an ad hoc reviewer for numerous other journals, including the American Journal of Epidemiology,��Pediatrics,��Stroke, and American Journal of Psychiatry. He is currently serving a four-year term as a member of the National Institute of Child Health and Development’s (NICHD’s) Health, Behavior, and Context Subcommittee.

In addition to a series of graduate research assistantships at Johns Hopkins, she was a student investigator at the Centre for Child and Adolescent Health, Dhaka, Bangladesh and the National Institute for Diagnosis and Vaccine Development in Infectious Diseases, School of Public Health, Xiamen University, Xiamen, China where she Implemented a study examining the persistence of antibodies after hepatitis E virus infection.

Her professional portfolio includes participation on numerous research grants, including an award from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation where she was a student investigator on the project, “Determinants of Immunological Persistence of Hepatitis E Virus Antibodies.” The purpose of the study was to determine antibody persistence after Hepatitis e virus and vaccination in South Asia.