Environmental Agents as Modulators of Disease Processes

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Abstract of Parent Award The overarching goals of the Rochester Environmental Health Sciences Center (EHSC) are to prevent disease and improve health by advancing innovative and impactful translational environmental health research, engaging communities to address environmental health issues, and enhancing career development of talented environmental health investigators. More specifically, the goals of the Center are to: (1) enrich the ability to hypothesize and implement cutting-edge translational environmental health research using modern approaches that also move knowledge into action; (2) advance science by stimulating the prediction and prevention of detrimental exposures on health across the lifespan by developing and using the best available tools and approaches, and integrating new information to understand cumulative risks; (3) promote career development of the next generation of environmental health investigators in a diverse, inclusive, supportive, and collaborative environment; (4) foster interactions of Center members and community partners to cultivate new ideas and respond to issues of concern at the local, national, and international level; and (5) support existing and build new institutional and inter-institutional partnerships. The Rochester EHSC achieves these goals by providing a framework that is anchored in our overall mission to improve public health through the generation of fundamental knowledge and elaboration of mechanisms by which chemical exposures, alone or through interaction with other modifying factors, contribute to cumulative health risk across the life span. A key strength of the Center is that activities are not siloed within the study of a specific organ system or a single disease. As such, the central theme that integrates EHSC research and community engagement programs is the desire to understand how exposures and interactions of environmental factors affect health and disease across the lifespan. This theme weaves together and synergizes Center member efforts, such that the totality of our impact is greater than each part would achieve on its own. Further supporting the Center is a strong tradition of emphasizing and integrating basic mechanistic research in model systems with clinical and epidemiological approaches, which catalyzes multidirectional transformation of new information into actions. The Center also sustains strong community partnerships that develop, advise, and also learn from new methods and engage diverse communities in our region and across the nation. Unique and expanded strengths of our Center combined with emerging new areas underlie proposed Center activities, programs, and use of resources, and provide the foundation for future success. Further supporting our success is the broad- based scientific diversity of our faculty, which ideally positions us to apply integrative and innovative strategies to address critical questions in environmental health sciences.