About Us

Human Health and the Environment

Our aim is to understand how human health, at both the individual and population level, is impacted by environmental factors and to implement this knowledge to reduce the adverse impacts of environment factors on human health.

CHHE is an NIEHS-funded Environmental Health Science Core Center.

“CHHE provides focus, resources and leadership for interdisciplinary research that improves human health locally, nationally, and globally.”

-Rob Smart, Founding Director

Interdisciplinary Research Interest Groups

CHHE has developed five Interdisciplinary Research Interest Groups (RIGs) organically evolved from our membership:

• The Water and Emerging Challenges group focuses on the diverse aspects of emerging contaminants including toxicology, chemistry, exposure assessment, bioinformatics, engineering, and biology as well as science communication. 
• The Genes, Environment and Precision Health group includes researchers who study environment, genome, epigenome interactions and health outcomes.
• The Climate Change and Airborne Contaminants group focuses on how environmental exposure influence lung disease progression.
• The Behavior and Neuroscience group focuses on the impact of environmental exposures on neurodevelopment, brain and behavior.
• The Environmental Health Disparities group focuses on the disproportionate impact of environmental pollution on overburdened communities.

Research Support/Facility Cores

CHHE has developed three facility cores that increase the impact and the basic science and translational capacity of its Research Teams.

• The Career Development Program supports investigators at all career stages through collaboration, leadership, and funding opportunities. While available to all investigators, the program generally emphasizes investigators in early- and mid-career, backgrounds and experiences underserved by science, and includes events and enrichment activities.
• The Systems Technologies Core provides cutting-edge technologies involving proteomics, metabolomics, metallomics, and genomics along with dedicated bioinformatics support.
• The third core, the Translational Research Support Core, facilitates bidirectional translation between basic science and public health outcomes by providing data science analysis and visualization support for analysis of human population and multi-omic studies as well as population-based study expertise.

Community Engagement

The multi-directional Community Engagement Core fosters relationships between CHHE and affected communities in NC, which leads to collaborative interaction among researchers, educators, and citizens to enhance EHS knowledge, literacy, and health.

Supporting Research

A Career Development Program for early- and mid-career investigators is coordinated with a robust Pilot Project Program that supports collaborative and multidisciplinary EHS projects to enhance the research success of our members. Supplemental funding provides seed funding, travel funds, and service vouchers.