The top four causes of deaths in the U.S. are diet related and many other troublesome diseases are affected by diet, It will be important therefore to capture nutritional status, food environment, and repeated 24h (ASA24s) dietary intakes along with measures that can validate dietary measures of public policy interest including added sugar, energy, protein, sodium, iron, vitamins, dietary supplements, potassium, fruits... more »

Obesity and poor diet are threats to population health. The food environment and related policies may be major contributors. Longitudinal measures of food purchasing, diet, and health can be linked to environmental/policy data (eg community gardens, changes in convenience store offerings, fast food moratoriums, menu labeling, food taxes/subsidies), and used to identify health effects. Results can help prioritize multilevel... more »

Exposure to air pollutants in the ambient (indoor and outdoor) environment is associated with numerous adverse health outcomes, including cancer. A key challenge for cancer studies is the lack information on individual-level activities and other determinants of personal exposures over the lifetime; existing studies have had to rely on assumptions about time spent in microenvironments. Moreover, most data are from urban... more »

Most research is devoted understanding factors which increase disease risk. Here we specifically seek to find individuals who are healthy despite exposure to high levels of environmental pollutants, e.g. living in areas with elevated air pollution, and examine the lifestyle factors which may be protective. Protective lifestyle factors may be modifiable by the individual and may represent a means to improve environmental... more »

Defining heightened sensitivity as an increased hazard ratio for an association between air pollution and a health outcome, identify subsets of the population based on molecular factors, e.g. genetic variants, hypermethylated regions, which are at increases risk of adverse cardiovascular or pulmonary events during high air pollution days.

Focusing recruitment on communities with a disproportionate burden of environmental exposure (such as Western New York), develop and test a multi-level model to ascertain the burden of environmental illness symptom clusters, asthma, and allergies attributable to environmental factors at the 1) community/neighborhood, 2) household, 3) personal, 4) internal body burden 5) inflammatory biomarker response levels over time.... more »

Emerging data suggest that exposure to toxicants during key life stages, such as puberty, alter breast development and influence cancer risk. A comprehensive measure of environmental exposures (e.g. air pollutants, parabens, phenols, pesticides) at puberty could link to future breast cancer associated diagnoses (benign breast disease, atypical ductal hyperplasia, ductal carcinoma in situ, invasive breast cancer) identified... more »

Women of African, compared to European, ancestry in the US are 2-3x more likely to be diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer. The causes are unknown, but striking disparities in exposure to a number of potential carcinogens have been identified. Quantifying environmental exposures and linking to electronic health records for breast cancer associated diagnoses would define the extent of disparities, chemical associations... more »

Complex diseases are a result of a complex interplay of genetic, environmental, host and societal factors operating over a prolonged time. Many factors associated with disease onset or progression have been elucidated using a silo-ed approach which fails to adequately assess interplay between factors. Longitudinal measures and more sophisticated analytical methods are needed to support comprehensive (e.g. systems or computational... more »

Biological, psychological & social domains interact at multiple levels (genes, human & environment microbiomes, stress, behavior, broad SES & environment) outlined by the biopsychosocial ecological model (BPSEM). The BPSEM specifies pathways aligned with the AoU pillars of biology, lifestyle, & environment. Simultaneous examination of the interacting domains and levels of the BPSEM is now computationally possible and... more »