The research of this broad-based Center is directed towards understanding and preventing injuries induced by environmentally hazardous agents, with strong focuses on heavy metals, air pollution, and occupational exposures in human diseases. The NYU Center has well-established research strengths in cardiopulmonary toxicology, metal toxicology, environmental carcinogenesis, exposure assessment, and environmental epidemiology, with epigenetics an important new focus that intersects all of these areas. The broad goals of the Center, which are well aligned to advance the Strategic Plan of the NIEHS, are the identification, evaluation, prevention, and control of the adverse impacts of environmental factors on human health. Through its active Working Groups, the NYU Center currently focuses on six important areas in environmental health sciences: environmental epigenetics, health effects of nanoparticles, environmentally induced cardiovascular injuries, carcinogenesis, exposure assessment, and environmental effects of non-conventional hydraulic fracking. Each of the six Working Groups dedicated to each area has a dual focus, with leadership in basic research coordinated and in translational or population-based research. To achieve its goals, the Center brings together investigators with a diversity of skills from a wide variety of scientific and public health disciplines. Furthermore, the Center reaches out to local and regional communities via its Community Outreach and Education Core (COEC), in a multi-directional process that provides assistance, information, and education on environmental issues to the communities while receiving valuable insight on community concerns to guide future research within the Center.This allows the Center to foster research in complex problems (e.g. mixtures of toxic metals and PAH in local Superfund toxic waste sites) and embrace emerging environmental exposure problems (e.g. fracking, electronic cigarette aerosol toxicity).The highly successful Pilot Project Program, and the Career Development Program, facilitate the development of new research ideas and new environmental health investigators. With institutional support, we will continue to recruit additional facultyfrom outside NYU to firmly solidify the Center's integrated focus on environmental epigenetics. The Center supports several Facility Cores, which continue to evolve so that Center members have access to and training in the latest technologies and analytical methods. To maintain the Center's cutting-edge relevance the Facility Cores, Pilot Project Program and Working Groups are reviewed annually by user surveys to evaluate their effectiveness and needs for enhancement.
The NIEHS Core Center grant from NYU is broadly based with research focusing on adverse effects of air pollution, metals, and nanoparticles. The Center supports facility cores that help investigators conduct research and also organizes working groups as well as community outreach and engagement.
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