The Mount Sinai Transdisciplinary Center on Early Environmental Exposures

Project Summary Our “Transdisciplinary Center on Early Environmental Exposures” has catalyzed remarkable environmental health research growth in just 3 years. We have formed new transdisciplinary teams, linked together scientists with dissimilar backgrounds to address complex research questions, and built a strong base of NIEHS funding including a CHEAR lab hub, the CHEAR Data Center, 2 ECHO grants, 5 new R01s, and 9 K awards themed on environmental health. Our Pilot Projects have fueled much of this growth and have been a strong vehicle for career development. Our Research Groups emphasize early life chemical and physical environmental exposures, their mixed exposure effects, their interactions with the social environment as well as the role of sexually dimorphic responses to exposure. Through our community partnerships, we translate our research findings into evidence-based approaches for disease prevention and treatment with strong links to community groups and physicians. Our Center supports three Facility Cores: an Integrated Health Sciences Facility Core that supports biomarker research and access to research populations (both clinic patients and NIH funded longitudinal cohorts), a Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Facility Core that supports analysis of environmental health/toxicology data and creates new data analytical methods for complex mixtures; and a clinically-oriented Phenotyping and Environmental Modifiers Facility Core that supports state of the art health measures as well as measures of the environmental modifiers (stress, nutrition etc). Our Community Engagement Core is committed to bidirectional communication and partnership with the diverse and disadvantaged communities that Mount Sinai serves. Our NIEHS Core Center supports the infrastructure that our research teams depend upon and will continue to build capacity for new research programs in environmental health. In fact, we are now poised to expand, given our newly announced “Institute for Exposomic Research” (see Dean's letter). This new institute will provide infrastructure and staffing resources to further increase capacity of our facility cores and stay abreast of the many scientific breakthroughs that will undoubtedly occur in Exposure Science and Environmental Health. The institute is built around our P30 Center which is its center of operations. Finally, our program is clearly in line with NIEHS strategic goals. Our Research groups (multiple exposures/mixtures, stress-chemical interactions and sex specific effects) are designed to address the NIEHS strategic plan which emphasizes the study of multiple exposures working via multiple mechanisms. NIEHS's strategic plan emphasizes understanding shared biological pathways of exposures, understanding individual susceptibility, studying mixtures/exposomics, environmental causes of disease, health disparities and community engagement, all of which are inherent in our Center's work. In closing, our P30 Center has been remarkably successful in its very first grant cycle, is about to grow even further, and in this renewal will continue to meet the changing infrastructure needs of our environmental research community.