Harvard NIEHS Center for Environmental Health

Welcome to our Research Center!

The Harvard School of Public Health - National institute of Environmental Health Sciences (HSPH-NIEHS) Center is a coordinated set of resources and facilities supporting environmental health research and training activities throughout the Boston area. The Center promotes integration between basic and applied environmental science, and fosters collaborations that cross departmental and institutional boundaries.

Our research combines population and patient based studies with mechanistic laboratory investigation to illuminate the pathways by which environmental exposures cause health effects. We prioritize questions that are directly relevant to real human populations, thus pivoting a two-way conversation between scientific knowledge production and community needs and values.

Center investigations are organized around three currently important environmental exposures – Metals, Organics and Particles, and focus on gene-environment interactions in prospective cohort studies, life-stage analysis of environmental health, and promotion of multidisciplinary research.

Work in these areas is supported by two facility cores, the Integrated Health Sciences Facility Core (IHSFC), and the Environmental Statistics & Bioinformatics Core.  These cores provide access to critical technologies and expertise needed for modern environmental studies. Through our Community Outreach program our “Populations to Pathways” approach to environmental health challenges is brought to bear on public health policy and clinical practice.

2012 marks the 50^thanniversary of our Center, the first of the NIEHS Core Centers, founded in 1962.  We celebrate this occasion in March by hosting a gathering of the leadership of all twenty NIEHS Centers from around the country to examine the past 50 years of environmental health research and take steps toward actualizing a strategic vision for the future.