The long-term goal of our HSPH NIEHS Center for Environmental Health (the Harvard-NIEHS Center) is to identify how environmental exposures interact with susceptibility factors to cause disease, and then to use these findings to inform prevention and intervention strategies both locally and globally. As described in the Strategic Vision and Impact on Environmental Health section, the framework for our Center interaction is outlined in Figure 1. Our NIEHS Center is designed to take advantage of new scientific technologies and approaches, and we have actively organized our facility cores to support this mission. Over the past 12 months, we have worked to address the challenge outlined in the new guidelines for NIEHS Center Cores to develop an Integrated Health Sciences Facility Core (IHSFC). Our internal mandate was to maintain unique facilities that support Center research, to focus support for facility core services based on investigator-driven demand and to facilitate access to modern genomic and molecular technologies. After extensive internal deliberation and consultation, we have incorporated and expanded the best aspects of three of the existing facility cores (Biological Analysis Core;Exposure and Environmental Analysis Core, and Clinical Studies Core: Environmental Genomics)mio the new IHFSC described in this section of the application. The new IHFSC will provide access to Center investigators to state-of-the-art genomic, biological, and environmental exposure instrumentation and facilities. The new IHFSC facilitates each of the major aspects of the paradigm shown in Figure 1 in a streamlined, interactive and efficient manner. We have already implemented some of the changes and are pleased to report below how these changes are increasing access of Center members to the facilities and technologies they need. Based on this early success, we expect that the transition to the IHSFC structure will be seamless. New Center members and pilot grant awardees are oriented to our new structure and provided detailed descriptions of the offered services on the Center web site (www.hsph.harvard.edu/niehs) and through orientation discussions with the IHSFC director.
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