Center for Environmental Health and Justice in Northern Manhattan

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SUMMARY – OVERALL COMPONENT Our world is changing rapidly. Societal, planetary, and technological changes require an ever-evolving vision for solving emerging and persisting environmental health challenges, from polluted air and water to climate change, microplastics, and new types of chemicals. We have also become increasingly aware that minoritized and low-income communities confront more environmental harm than other communities. Therefore, our theme, “Re-envisioning environmental health and justice in a changing world,” captures the vision for the next funding period of the Center for Environmental Health and Justice in Northern Manhattan (CEHJNM). The Center’s work will be articulated across five directions that reflect our strengths and interests, which we will advance through corresponding working groups: (1) Environmental Justice; (2) Advancing the Exposome; (3) Environmental Data Science; (4) Biological and Molecular Mechanisms; and (5) Climate and Health The mission of the CEHJNM is to understand health concerns caused by environmental exposures and address environmental inequities through translational science and partnerships. CEHJNM is housed in the low-income neighborhood of Washington Heights, surrounded by communities in Harlem and the South Bronx disproportionally burdened by harmful environmental conditions. Our Community Engagement Core builds on a longstanding and impactful collaboration with our primary local partner, WE ACT for Environmental Justice— a highly visible non-profit Harlem organization dedicated to environmental justice and proposes new methods of identifying and collaborating with community groups and supporting research to examine and ameliorate environmental health disparities. We house a Career Development Program that has successfully supported scientists at Columbia University and will now also work with Agents of Change in Environmental Justice, a national program that trains and empowers emerging investigators from historically excluded backgrounds. Our Integrated Health Sciences Facility Core will integrate the expertise of six laboratories in sampling, processing, and state-of-the-art analysis of environmental and biological matrices. Our Study Design and Data Science Facility Core facilitates the use of contemporary study designs and a wide array of data management, biostatistics, and data science approaches. CEHJNM’s Pilot Project Program has a 6-week turnaround from submission to funding for full applications (≤35K) and one-week turnaround for mini-pilots (≤10K). Pilots have stimulated innovative directions—ranging from new laboratory methods to data science and community partnerships—and has yielded 40-fold returns in external funding; in the current cycle, 87% of the pilot funding was awarded to Principal Investigators who were early-career faculty or non-members at the time of the award. Building on CEHJNM’s record of success, we propose through this application a renewed organizational structure, enhanced services, and strategic future directions to continue to respond to the most urgent local and global public health challenges of our times.