The Mount Sinai Environmental Health Sciences Center is a multidisciplinary research unit. Its goal is to focus and enhance research related to environmental health so that this research forms an effective, coordinated basis for the understanding, prevention and control of human disease of environmental origin. Stimulated by a review one year ago, the Center has undergone substantial expansion and restructuring. This reconfiguration has had three goals: (1) to enhance integration of basic science into the Center to make the research programs more truly multidisciplinary, (2) to concentrate research into a finite number of targeted areas consistent with the Center's strengths; and (3) to address unmet needs for preventive intervention in environmental health research. Specific changes to achieve these goals have been: -Initiation of a national and international search for a Deputy Center Director for Research. This person will be a basic biological scientist, an accomplished researcher, capable of cross-disciplinary collaboration; -Admission to membership in the Center of distinguished scientists from departments throughout the Mount Sinai School of Medicine; -Expansion and restructuring of the pilot project grant program to foster new collaborative links; -Realignment of the research and support Cores to focus and enhance cross-disciplinary research; -Creation, with grant support from NIEHS, of a new multidisciplinary research Core in Heavy Metals; -Recruitment in the Exposure Assessment Core of an experienced, certified industrial hygienist as well as a biophysicist skilled in the measurement of body burdens of heavy metals. The Center now consists of multidisciplinary research Cores in Environmental Cancer, Heavy Metals, Environmental Neurotoxicology and Environmental Epidemiology plus service Cores in Biostatistics and Data Management, Exposure Assessment and Clinical/Occupational Medicine. The Mount Sinai Environmental Health Sciences Center is among the oldest and most distinguished environmental health research units in the United States. It has been associated with fundamental advances in knowledge of environmental toxins, and this seminal research has been responsible for major triumphs in intervention against environmental disease. It is unique in its location in a major tertiary-care medical center, and it enjoys superb access to populations at high risk of toxic exposures. The Center is extraordinarily well positioned to study illnesses of environmental origin and to conduct research that provides a scientifically robust basis for intervention.
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