The Metals Epidemiology Research Group (MERG) is directed by Dr Robert Wright at Children's Hospital, Boston and Harvard School of Public Health. MERG was first established in 1991 by Howard Hu, M.D., M.P.H., Sc.D. as a collaboration between a number of environmental health scientists who are interested in applying new techniques to study the potential impact of lead and other heavy metals on health. These scientists are based mainly at the Harvard School of Public Health, the Channing Laboratory of the Brigham and Women's Hospital, Children's Hospital, Boston and other Boston-area institutions. Work by the group was initially supported by an R01 grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) to conduct an epidemiologic study of lead burden and hypertension among community-exposed adults. Robert Wright, M.D., M.P.H., a pediatrician, toxicologist, and epidemiologist, with expertise in genetic epidemology joined MERG in 1997 and expanded its research base to encompass multiple studies of metals in children.
Over the last 15 years, the work of MERG has grown to encompass the impact of multiple metals on adult and pediatric health outcomes; the potential modifying influence on these relationships played by nutrition, social environment and genetics; and the toxicity of other metals, notably mercury, arsenic, cadmium, and manganese. The base of funding for the work of the MERG has also grown to include a number of other sources of support, including, at various times, additional grants from NIEHS and others from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health,the National Institute of Mental Health, the March of Dimes, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the Fogarty Center of the National Institutes of Health. International collaborations include the National Institute of Public Health, Mexico, the Leaves of Grass Foundation and Ramachandra Medical College and Research Institute, Chennai, India.
On September 1 of 2006, Dr. Hu, left Harvard to assume his new position as Chair of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences and Professor of Environmental Health, Epidemiology, and Medicine at the University of Michigan Schools of Public Health and Medicine in Ann Arbor, MI. Dr. Wright, who had been associate director, assumed the leadership of MERG and has expanded its research portfolio considerably.
Since 2006, Dr Wright and Dr. Hu have established extensive collaborations with investigators at the University of Michigan and Harvard, and MERG has evolved into a Harvard-Michigan joint collaboration co-Directed by Drs. Wright and Hu. In addition to directing Harvard MERG, Dr. Wright also assumed Directorship of the NIEHS Center Metals Core at the Harvard School of Public Health in 2006. Dr. Wright serves as clinical faculty at Children's Hospital, Boston and is Research Director of their Pediatric Environmental Health Subspecialty Unit and the Associate Director of the Interdisciplinary Training Program in Neurotoxicology at HSPH.