Phenotyping and Environmental Modifiers Facility Core

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Project Summary The Phenotyping and Environmental Modifier Facility Core (PEMFC) organizes Mount Sinai's extensive environmental epidemiology, clinical, psychometric, data science and technical expertise as a key resource of the P30 Center on Health and Environment Across the LifeSpan. Since Center inception in 2014, the PEMFC has evolved to guide selection of age-appropriate, valid, time-effective, and low-burden approaches to measure health and disease across the lifespan with a focus on particular critical periods (pregnancy, infancy, early childhood, adolescence, midlife, older-adult). This includes Center-supported space and phenotyping equipment covering a growing list of identified target priority areas (obesity, respiratory, allergy, sleep, cardiovascular, endocrine, neurodevelopment/psychological phenotypes). The Core also facilitates research to elucidate the impacts of key interactions between chemical toxicants and environmental modifiers, specifically social determinants (e.g., psychological stress, social networks, gender) and nutrition. A related focus is to uncover mechanisms underlying health inequities observed in our local communities and more globally, linking to our Community Engagement Core. In this funding cycle, we will promote growth in large-scale population-based environmental health research, phenomics, and decentralized phenotyping. Our P30 Center sits within a health system comprising eight hospitals and over 400 practices that uses a unified Epic electronic health record. We are thus positioned to leverage an integrated clinical data warehouse linked with unique biobanks, providing an unprecedented foundation for integrating our healthcare delivery and data science efforts to generate novel environmental research. Coupling this with our Center's expertise in studying environmental exposures (ambient pollution, temperature, crime, built environment), capturing spatio-temporal variability and incorporating timescales from days to years, we can accelerate large- scale place-based transdisciplinary health research. We also harness institutional infrastructure in digital health (apps, wearables) and data science (machine learning) to facilitate decentralized phenotyping. The scope of responsibility for the PEMFC includes: 1) developing, maintaining, and providing access to pediatric and adult health assessments that include self-reports, observational data, and performance-based measures; 2) tailoring protocols to specific research needs; 3) advising psychometric analyses including the use of multiple phenotypes in a phenomic or true multivariate analysis; and 4) providing access to unique covariates from high-resolution and well-validated geospatial datasets. The PEMFC curates measures together with a summary of the psychometrics as well as detailed protocol(s) for data collection, data reduction and scoring procedures, and incorporation into analyses. To facilitate data sharing, interoperability, and harmonization for Center Member participation in collaborative multi-site studies, the PEMFC faculty will emphasize use of phenotype and effect modifier measures that can be characterized through common standardized metrics.