Rapid technological developments and the increasingly wired and connected world have expanded our ability to measure the external environment, human biology, and their interaction to generate a rich and nuanced picture of environmental exposures of people and place. The future of environmental health will be one of complex integration across a varied and rich exposure space. With this in mind, the theme of the Harvard Chan School-NIEHS Center is a re-envisioning of the exposure environment and the integrated effects of chemical and non-chemical stressors of people and place to better understand the impact of exposure on human health. Our theme will build on a unique and defining strength of the Harvard Chan School-NIEHS Center for Environmental Health; our unmatched portfolio of population and patient studies of environmental exposures and their health effects. These studies of the real-world environmental exposures of human subjects ensure that Center research can readily translate into public health policy and clinical practice. These population-based investigations combine with mechanistic laboratory studies to illuminate how the complex, real world lived environment acts to affect health. The Center will continue to foster integration across population and biological mechanism studies, and will also specifically develop and apply the best available technologies and methods to examine the complexity of exposures in the lived environment. Our Community Engagement Core (CEC) supports the Center?s goal to re-envision the environment, serving as a conduit for the local community to help researchers better envision the real world lived environmental exposure space, and to translate Center research into public policy and clinical practice efforts to benefit the community. To facilitate interaction, the Center is organized around three Research Cores representing major cross-cutting environmental health exposures: Particulate Matter and Other Air Pollutants, Metals, and Organic chemicals. Each of the Research Cores has a track record of productivity, potential for continued growth, and the ability to integrate and catalyze leadership in the future. Each Research Core is multidisciplinary and deploys the full range of our intellectual resources and features toxicology, basic mechanisms, in vitro models, animal models, gene-environment interactions, epidemiology, risk analysis, and risk communication. The Research Cores are supported by the Integrated Health Sciences Facility Core that provides access to cutting edge laboratory and exposure science resources; the Environmental Statistics and Bioinformatics Core that provides cutting edge statistical resources including development of methods to analyze the kind of complex mixtures that are found in the integrated exposure and outcome space we are focusing on; and the new Geographical and Contextual Measures Core that will provide both guidance and tools to conceptualize and measure the broad environmental landscape. The CEC provides a community context for the research and integrated sciences occurring within the Center and engages closely with our research and facility cores.
OVERALL NARRATIVE Building on a rich bank of population and clinical studies, the Harvard Chan School-NIEHS Center for Environmental Health is applying the best available technologies and methods to re-envision the complex lived environment exposure landscape, assess it, and address related health effects in our population studies. This includes new opportunities offered by the ??omics? era, with a particular new emphasis on the microbiome, to reveal the mechanisms of emerging environmental threats. We aim to work with the local community to guide the understanding and analysis of the lived environment and to make our research results immediately translatable to community concerns through public policy and other prevention efforts.
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