| Shanna Swan | |
| Birth Name: | Helen Wittenberg |
| Birth Place: | Ohio, United States |
| Other Names: | Helen Wittenberg |
| Fields: | Environmental and Reproductive Epidemiology |
| Thesis Title: | Limiting Distributions of Random Sums of Independent Random Variables |
| Thesis Year: | 1963 |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Lucien Marie Le Cam |
| Partners: | )--> |
Shanna Helen Swan (born May 1936)[1] is an American environmental and reproductive epidemiologist who is Professor of Environmental Medicine and Public Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where she has taught since April 2011. She is known for her research on environmental contributions to sperm count and the male infertility crisis.
Swan was born in Pennsylvania, United States.[1] Her father, Rudolph Wittenberg, was German Jewish, and her mother, Goldie Ray Polturak, was American.[1] She studied mathematics with a minor in logic at the City College of New York. She studied for her master's degree at Columbia University, working with Polish biostatistician Agnes Berger. She completed her doctorate in statistics, directed by Jerzy Newman at the University of California, Berkeley.[1]
After completing her doctorate, Swan worked for insurance company Kaiser Permanente investigating links between the contraceptive pill and conditions such as cervical cancer. She later worked for the California Department of Public Health, studying unexplained miscarriages in Santa Clara County. Swan joined a National Academy of Sciences committee in 1995 to research the impact of "hormonally active agents in the environment" sperm counts between 1938 and 1991. She later worked at the University of Missouri and the University of Rochester.[1]
She is Professor of Environmental Medicine and Public Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where she has worked since April 2011.[2]
In 2017, a paper on which Swan was senior author on environmental contributions to sperm count and the male infertility crisis[3] received significant attention in both the popular media and scholarly literature, becoming the world's 26th most referenced scientific paper published that year. She has also researched the effects of environmental chemicals and pharmaceutical drugs on the development of the human reproductive tract.[4] [5]
In 2021, with journalist Stacey Colino, Swan co-authored the book Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, Threatening Sperm Counts, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race, which discusses declining sperm counts in men and attributes this decline to endocrine-disrupting chemicals.[6]
Swan was the first wife of David A. Freedman, with whom she had two children: Joshua Freedman and Deborah Freedman Lustig.[7] [8] She had a third child, Christo Swan, after marrying Henry Swan III. She later married Steven R. Brown.