Fostering Scientific and Workforce Diversity by Maintaining and Enriching the CHAMACOS Birth Cohort

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ABSTRACT CHAMACOS is a longitudinal cohort study of Latino mothers and children from a California farmworker community who have been followed for more than 20 years to assess the impact of environmental exposures and social determinants on children’s health and development. CHAMACOS mothers were enrolled during pregnancy in 1999-2000; they and their children have been seen regularly since then. Over the past two decades, we have amassed a rich trove of behavioral, health, and exposure data from this cohort. Our active biorepository houses 330,000 biological (e.g. blood, urine, breastmilk, hair, saliva, teeth) and environmental samples (e.g. dust, allergens) that we continue to mine for new insights in environmental health. We also hold two decades’ worth of data on children’s neurodevelopment, lung function, physical growth, pubertal timing, cardiometabolic health, and psychosocial functioning and mental health into young adulthood. The cohort currently consists of almost 600 mothers (1st generation) and their 20-22 year old young adult children (2nd generation), some of whom have begun to have children themselves (3rd generation). We propose to begin data collection on the 3rd generation of participants, providing an unprecedented opportunity to assess, under future funding, multigenerational epigenetic effects of environmental exposure and social determinants in a well-characterized Latino cohort. Under the previous R24, we continued our strong community engagement that is vital to retention of the cohort; facilitated new research partnerships; improved our data sharing capabilities, protocols, and transparency through a web-portal; and maintained a strong Biorepository that is poised to address new research questions. In the next phase of this project, under the U24, we will expand on this important work by enriching our cohort with additional data on social determinants of health; laying the groundwork to enroll the 3rd generation of CHAMACOS participants; and promoting scientific and workforce diversity through collaborations with Hispanic-Serving Institutions and students and clinicians from Latino farmworker communities. We will expand resource sharing by making our data publicly available through an open-access data repository and promote sharing of biological and environmental samples through our web portal. Additionally, as the CHAMACOS founders move into retirement, we will transfer the leadership of the cohort to a new generation of investigators to ensure its continued, long-term success. This cohort represents a wealth of resources that should be maintained, enriched, and shared for future research opportunities. It has an engaged Latino participant population that allows scientific insight into an underserved population and provides opportunities to engage young Latino students, clinicians, and junior faculty to build the pipeline of future environmental health researchers.