The Harvard NIEHS Center for Environmental Health serves as the primary focus for environmental health-related research and training activities in the Harvard School of Public Health, in the Harvard Longwood Medical Area, and more broadly as an integrating umbrella for environmental health research in the Boston health sciences research community. The Center was established in 1958 to foster collaborative arrangements that cross-departmental and institutional boundaries to promote interdisciplinary research projects.

It is the oldest NIEHS Center. For 50 years, the HSPH-NIEHS Center for Environmental Health has supported the NIEHS mission of promoting research and training related to the etiology, mechanisms, diagnosis, treatment and prevention of human diseases and disorders caused by environmental factors. The Harvard-NIEHS Center is a coordinated set of resources and facilities shared by investigators with a diverse array of environmental research projects and pilot projects. The Center has enhanced the synergy of the research and training projects at the Harvard School of Public Health. More than 50 faculty, 100 staff, and 100 degree candidates and postdoctoral fellows participate in Harvard Center activities. Throughout its history, the Center has evolved to incorporate new science, new technologies, and new environmental health challenges.

The theme of the Center is "Populations to Pathways", where the population and patient based studies combine with mechanistic laboratory studies to illuminate the pathways by which environmental exposures cause health effects. The Harvard-NIEHS Center makes this partnership a productive ‘two-way street': Data from populations inform and guide studies of pathways in animal and cell culture models. In turn, the evidence from pathway studies is used to improve or develop new population studies of exposures and health effects. Together our ‘Populations to Pathways' research provides both estimates of human population risk as well as adding to the understanding of mechanistic pathways of environmental health effects. The investigations of populations and pathways in turn inform public health policy and clinical practice through our community outreach program.

The major objective of the Harvard-NIEHS Center in the next five years is to apply best available technologies and methods to population studies, including the riches offered by the "‘omics" era. The Harvard-NIEHS Center will focus on three specific directions: gene-environment interactions in prospective cohort studies, life-stage analysis of environmental health, and continued promotion of multidisciplinary research.

The Center's current organization is shown below. Please click on a specific core for more detailed information.