This is a renewal application for the Johns Hopkins Center in Urban Environmental Health for the five-year period April 2008 to March 2013.The long-term goals emanating from the theme of our Center are (a) to identify environmental exposures, their biological consequences and underlying susceptibility factors, the nexus of gene-environment interactions, that alone or together increase health risk for people living in urban environments, such as Baltimore, and (b) to use these findings to develop prevention and intervention strategies to improve urban environmental health both locally and globally. The Center is organized with three research foci under the leadership of Dr. Jonathan Samet (Research Focus 1: Environmental Epidemiology and Exposure Assessment), Dr. Valeria Culotta (Research Focus 2: Molecular Basis of Environmental Disease) and Dr. Paul Strickland (Research Focus 3: Public Health Interventions and Prevention). Each of these leaders have been in similar leadership positions in this Center for the past ten years and therefore there will be continuity in the transition to this new Center structure. The Community Outreach and Education Core is being maintained under the leadership of Dr. Michale Trush. The implementation of the Integrative Health Sciences Facility Core has been accomplished and the other facility core is Bioinformatics and Biostatistics. The management of the Center is facilitated by using both an Internal and External Advisory Board structure. The Center's Pilot Project Program is essential to meet our goal's and these resources provide seed funding of new ideas which can result in the generation of preliminary data in support of a subsequent grant application. The Directors Fund has been established and these monies will primarily be used for the rapid response to opportunities that emerge from the Integrated Health Sciences Facility Core. In summary, we feel that our strategies over the next five years will continue to help us address the long-term goals emanating from the theme of our Center: to identify environmental exposures, their consequences and underlying susceptibility factors, the nexus of gene-environment interactions, that alone or together increase health risk for people living in urban environments, such as Baltimore, and then to use these findings to develop prevention and intervention strategies to improve global environmental health.
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