UCSF Environmental Research and Translation for Health Center (EaRTH Center)

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The overall goal of the new University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Environmental Research and Translation for Health (EaRTH) Center is to accelerate the pace of recognizing and preventing environmental exposures that affect reproduction and development to improve human health across the lifespan. Addressing the complex problems of environmental health requires partnerships across disciplines; mobilization of technology for identification, intervention, and prevention; and education of future scientists and clinicians and the public. The EaRTH Center is uniquely positioned to address these challenges and advance environmental health. By virtue of its location at UCSF—a premier institution for biomedical research, translation of research findings, and clinical training—and its strong interdisciplinary team, the EaRTH Center will fill a critical gap in a prominent clinical and biomedical research setting. Our proposed UCSF P30 EaRTH Center will allow us to: create opportunities for new research directions in environmental health at UCSF that are not currently possible; nurture and sustain transdisciplinary research collaborations across a network of academics and diverse UCSF departments to advance our understanding of the relationship between environment and disease; mentor and grow the next generation of research and clinical leaders in environmental health; and embed environmental health literacy within health care to accelerate prevention of environmentally mediated diseases. Our Center tightly integrates 4 cores and 1 program: 1) an Administrative Core to provide leadership, infrastructure, administrative and communication support, advice and oversight to coordinate all EaRTH Center operations; 2) an Integrated Health Sciences Facility Core (IHSFC) that will provide consultation on study design, data integration, data of environmental and social stressors, and translation and dissemination of research findings; 3) a Bioassay Facility Core that will provide state-of-the-art tools for measuring chemical exposures and their effects on biological pathways; 4) a Community Engagement Core (CEC) to expand environmental health education and resources for students and health professionals to embed environmental health within health care; and 5) a Pilot Project Program to fund transdisciplinary projects enabling researchers to enter the field or add an environmental component to their current research. Our integrated Center will lead to new scientific understandings in environmental health tightly linked to our community outreach work, which will shift the fundamental understanding of the role of environment in disease, leading to solutions to preventing harmful exposures and improving health.