New Mexico NIEHS Center

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The Mission of the New Mexico Environmental Health Sciences Center is to address the needs and concerns of Southwestern communities relating to environmental health issues and to conduct basic and translational research on regionally-relevant environmental public health issues. Many New Mexico and Tribal communities in the Southwest have historically born a disproportionate share of exposure to a wide variety of environmental toxicants in the air, water and soil, and recent evidence raises concerns that members of many communities are suffering adverse health effects from environmental exposures. There has been great interest in recent years in studying genetic susceptibility factors that lead to increased risk of environmental diseases, and indeed many of the studies conducted by our Center investigators look directly at gene and environmental factor interactions. However, there has been little work on the influence of social economic status (SES) and behavioral issues and their influence on environmental disease. There is emerging research that indicates that SES and behavioral issues may play as important a role in disease triggering as genetic factors. The theme of this NIEHS Center will be "Environmental Disease and Health Promotion in Susceptible Southwestern Populations." We will focus on potential environmental causes of airway inflammation, asthma, cancer, and other environmental diseases. This theme was chosen based upon the perceived and real health concerns of our southwestern communities in New Mexico and surrounding areas, as well as the ability of the UNM Health Sciences Center and the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute (LRRI) to respond to these concerns with population-based studies and translational research projects. The New Mexico NIEHS Center will be led by an Administrative Core, and there will be three Research Cores (RCs), four Facility Cores (FCs), and a Community Outreach and Education Program (COEP). RC1 will focus on gene-environment interactions that are important in environmental disease, RC2 will examine environmental lung diseases including asthma and cancer, and RC3 will be a population health core focusing on public health, behavioral, and issues of SES. This core will also have a component examining Ethical, Social, and Legal Implications (ELSI) for population-based and community-engaged research. The FCs will include FCI: Environmental Assessments and Exposures, FC2: Biotechnology (genomics, proteomics, and innovative flow cytometry), FC3: Biocomputing and Bioinformatics, FC4: Biostatistics (which will also have a geospatial information system, GIS, component). The COEP will focus on established interactions with Native American sovereign nations and communities (Navajo, Zuni, Jemez, Laguna, Acoma, and others) as well as on a community partnership with the Albuquerque South Valley, and with U.S.-Mexico community partners.