Dr. Clifton Dassuncao is a senior epidemiologist and board-certified toxicologist whose career has focused on understanding and mitigating human exposures to harmful contaminants in the environment. He has a strong background in research methods and biostatistics developed during his doctoral and post-doctoral training, where he built models to better understand the fate, transport, bioaccumulation, and human exposures of emerging contaminants.

At ERG, Clifton supports federal, state, and not-for-profit clients with exposure assessments, risk evaluations, toxicological reviews, and epidemiological studies that address emerging environmental health concerns, such as PFAS, cyanobacterial harmful algal blooms, and infectious diseases. His work applies a range of exposure assessment and epidemiological tools—including biomonitoring and wastewater-based surveillance—to help communities and decision-makers better understand population-level exposures to chemical and biological hazards. He has supported biomonitoring efforts that measure environmental biomarkers in blood and urine, as well as projects that use wastewater to monitor for drugs and viral pathogens.

Clifton holds an Sc.D. and M.S. in environmental health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a B.S. in civil and environmental engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a Diplomate of the American Board of Toxicology (DABT).