Bio

I’m Carolyn Mattingly. I took a somewhat unconventional path to science and NC State, beginning with a BA in Art History from Oberlin College before earning a PhD in Molecular Toxicology from Tulane University and completing postdoctoral training in Pharmacology at Weill Cornell Medical College.

My research focuses on understanding how environmental exposures influence human health and contribute to disease. A major part of this work involves developing approaches to connect what we know about environmental chemicals with the genes, biological processes, and diseases they affect. Since 2001, I’ve worked with an amazing team of scientists, curators, and software developers to build and expand the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD). CTD integrates information about chemicals, genes and proteins, phenotypes, diseases, and real-world exposures, providing tools that help researchers investigate how environmental exposures affect biological systems and may contribute to chronic disease.

Increasingly, we are also using CTD and other computational approaches to guide experimental studies in zebrafish. These studies allow us to test predicted relationships between environmental exposures and disease-relevant biological mechanisms in a living vertebrate model. We are particularly interested in understanding how environmental chemicals interact with genetic susceptibility to influence processes such as oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, and neurodegeneration.

I direct NC State’s Superfund Research Program Center, the Center for Environmental and Health Effects of PFAS. The Center brings together scientists, students, community partners, and other stakeholders to better understand PFAS exposure and toxicity and to develop improved approaches for reducing and remediating PFAS contamination.

Lastly, I am direct the Career Development Core of our NIEHS-funded P30 Center for Human Health and the Environment in which I mentor and collaborate with faculty at NC State, NC Central University, and East Carolina University to optimize their environmental health-focused grant applications.

Together, these projects reflect a common goal: integrating environmental health data, computational approaches, and experimental models to better understand how the environment contributes to human disease.

Publications

• Peer Review Report For: Linking chemical data from the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database with adverse outcome pathways from the AOP-Wiki: a mechanistic data-oriented approach to help inform environmental health [version 1; peer review: 1 approved with reservations] , U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (2026)
• Peer Review Report For: Linking chemical data from the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database with adverse outcome pathways from the AOP-Wiki: a mechanistic data-oriented approach to help inform environmental health [version 1; peer review: 2 approved with reservations] , (2026)
• Peer Review Report For: Linking chemical data from the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database with adverse outcome pathways from the AOP-Wiki: a mechanistic data-oriented approach to help inform environmental health [version 1; peer review: 3 approved with reservations] , U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (2026)
• Peer Review Report For: Linking chemical data from the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database with adverse outcome pathways from the AOP-Wiki: a mechanistic data-oriented approach to help inform environmental health [version 2; peer review: 1 approved, 2 approved with reservations] , U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (2026)
• Integrating AI-powered text mining from PubTator into the manual curation workflow at the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database , Database (2025)
• Linking chemical data from the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database with adverse outcome pathways from the AOP-Wiki: a mechanistic data-oriented approach to help inform environmental health , F1000Research (2025)
• Comparative Toxicogenomics Database’s 20th anniversary: update 2025 , Nucleic Acids Research (2024)
• Transforming environmental health datasets from the comparative toxicogenomics database into chord diagrams to visualize molecular mechanisms , Frontiers in Toxicology (2024)
• CTD tetramers: a new online tool that computationally links curated chemicals, genes, phenotypes, and diseases to inform molecular mechanisms for environmental health , Toxicological Sciences (2023)
• Developmental cadmium exposure disrupts zebrafish vestibular calcium channels interfering with otolith formation and inner ear function , NeuroToxicology (2023)