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.

Leadership

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

-Rob Smart

Advisory Board/Committee

External Advisory Committee

• John Essigmann (MIT), William R. & Betsy P. Leitch Professor in Residence of Chemistry, Toxicology, and Biological Engineering, Director of MIT’s NIEHS EHS CC and T32 training grant, and an expert in mechanistic molecular and biochemical toxicology and chemical carcinogenesis.
• Shuk-Mei Ho (Univ. of Cincinnati, College of Medicine) Jacob G Schmidlapp Professor and Chair of the Department of Environmental Health, Director of University Cincinnati’s EHS CC, Director of the Cincinnati Cancer Center, and an expert in endocrine disrupting chemicals, epigenetics, and cancer.
• Margaret Karagas (Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine), James W. Squires Professor of Epidemiology, Chair Department of Epidemiology, Professor of Community and Family Department, Director of Children’s Environmental Health and Disease Prevention Research Center and the Center for Molecular Epidemiology at Dartmouth Medicine, and an expert in molecular, environmental, and cancer epidemiology. Stakeholder Advisory Committee

Stakeholder Advisory Board

• Edwin Davis | Science Teacher at Broughton High School | Director of Science Happens 4 Me
• Corie Hlavaty | Science Teacher at Lakewood Montessori Magnet School 
• Kwesi Brookins | Director of NC State’s Center for Family and Community Engagement | Professor, NCSU Department of Psychology 
• Louie Rivers | Associate Professor, NCSU Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources
• Kemp Burdette | Cape Fear RiverKeeper
• Heather Deck | Executive Director, Sound Rivers
• Lenora Smith | Executive Director, PEACH
• June Blotnick | Executive Director, Clean Aire NC

Interdisciplinary Research Interest Groups

CHHE has developed four Interdisciplinary Research Interest Groups (RIGs) organically evolved from our membership;

• The Emerging Contaminants group focuses on the diverse aspects of emerging contaminants including toxicology, chemistry, exposure assessment, bioinformatics, engineering, and biology as well as science communication. 
• The Environmental Epigenetics and Genetics group includes researchers who study environment, genome, epigenome interactions and health outcomes.
• The Pulmonary Health 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.

Facility Cores

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

• The Systems Technologies Core provides cutting-edge technologies involving proteomics, metabolomics, metallomics and genomics along with dedicated bioinformatics support.
• The Comparative Pathology Core provides pathologic phenotypic assessment of the many model organisms used by CHHE members.
• The third core, the Integrative Health Science Facility 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 Core 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 for , travel funds for , vouchers for .