Situated in the heart of Detroit, the environmental health sciences ?identity? of the Center for Urban Responses to Environmental Stressors (CURES) is to understand the health impacts of environmental exposures to complex chemical and non-chemical contaminants in Detroit's urban landscape. Our strategic vision is to provide leadership to identify, evaluate, and mitigate environmental health concerns in close collaboration with the community and environmental policy makers. CURES has assembled a unique interdisciplinary team of established and new environmental health scientists and community partners to address major environmental health challenges facing Detroit's racially and ethnically diverse population. We hypothesize that ?modern-era? diseases (e.g., cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes) that compromise the quality of life of residents living in an industrialized urban environment, such as Detroit, occur as a consequence of dynamic interactions among an individual's genetic and epigenetic make-up, nutritional status, and environmental stressors, which re-program key cellular networks to favor pathogenesis. CURES advances the NIEHS 2012-2017 Strategic Plan by nurturing strong bonds with Detroit's urban community, applying translational and interdisciplinary team-research approaches to solve complex environmental health problems, and by seeking the sources of environmental health disparities. CURES is making an impact in our region. Our researchers and community partners responded rapidly and coordinately to a serious emerging health crisis in our immediate vicinity; the 2015-2016 lead watershed contamination disaster in Flint, Michigan. To create a gateway to a healthy Detroit, CURES' short-term goals are to: 1) strengthen existing partnerships and continue to develop new ones between CURES and the Detroit community; 2) in collaboration with them, identify the chief environmental health threats to Detroit's vulnerable populations; 3) conduct highly integrated mechanistic, epidemiological, and community-engaged research that addresses the impact of urban environmental exposures on human health; 4) build the capacity of CURES to accomplish its research goals by providing facility cores that are optimized to meet the needs of its members and seed funds to support pilot projects to explore the feasibility of new areas of study; and 5) enhance the impact of CURES on the field of environmental health science by providing mentoring to new and established investigators that supports their professional goals and prepares them for leadership roles in environmental health research. Our long-term goals are to 1) enhance our community partners' efforts to increase community awareness and facilitate programs for a healthier community and 2) develop appropriate strategies, based on CURES research, to inform policy so as to mitigate the risks associated with urban environmental exposures. We believe that CURES is optimally positioned on the ground floor of innovative team science opportunities that have the greatest promise to realize the early detection, prevention, and eventual eradication of urban environmental disease in our lifetime.
The Wayne State University 'Center for Urban Responses to Environmental Stressors' (CURES) is focused on establishing a cleaner and healthier living and working environment in the City of Detroit and its regional neighbors. The CURES Center applies an integrated, community-engaged team approach to understand how exposure to urban environmental chemical and non-chemical stressors affects human health.
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