Expanding the vision of environmental health at UNC-CH.

Abstract

In a town that devotees call the “ Southern Part of Heaven,” the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) is known nationally for its schools of public health, medicine, and pharmacy. These schools are physically just across the street from one another, but they can seem worlds away if their knowledge and resources aren’t shared. To bring these researchers together, the Center for Environmental Health and Susceptibility (CEHS) was funded with a $3.78 million, four-year grant from the NIEHS to become one of 22 Environmental Health Sciences Centers. “We have an unusual mix of basic, clinical, and population scientists,” says CEHS director James Swenberg, a UNC-CH professor of environmental sciences and engineering. “The center’s goal is to, by bringing these groups together, expand our vision of environmental health research.” Center researchers work to understand the fundamental processes that contribute to chemical toxicity and to combine this knowledge with epidemiology to reduce environmental disease. Increasingly, work at the center focuses on understanding how environmental and genetic determinants of disease work together in populations. And whereas researchers have in the past focused largely on average susceptibility when looking at the distribution of disease among a particular population, CEHS scientists are among those now looking at populations with greater- or lesser-than-average disease susceptibility, Swenberg says. Furthermore, they are trying to help people understand what role their genetic makeup plays in susceptibility. That expanded vision can be seen in the center’s recent growth, in April 2004, from three research cores to five. The center also includes four facility cores to offer services such as high-throughput genetic analysis, provision of a variety of biomarkers, and expertise on statistical design and analysis. And the Community Outreach and Education Program (COEP) brings what researchers are learning to the people of North Carolina and beyond.