Public release date: 17-Jun-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Keith Herrell keith.herrell@uc.edu 513-558-4559 University of Cincinnati Academic Health Center

CINCINNATIThe University of Cincinnati's (UC) environmental health department has received an $8.7 million federal grant to continue operating its Center for Environmental Genetics (CEG).

Led by Shuk-mei Ho, PhD, director, the CEG supports state-of-the-art core facilities and technologies needed to conduct innovative research that focuses on how environmental agents interact with genetic and epigenetic factors to influence disease risk and outcome.

This funding renewal, from the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), will be dispersed in annual increments of about $1.74 million through March 31, 2018. The center is one of 20 Environmental Health Sciences (EHS) Core Centers funded by the NIEHS, designed to build scientific collaboration to identify toxicants in the environment, learn how these toxicants affect people's health and provide insights into preventing environmentally induced illnesses.

Additional missions of the center are to attract new talents to EHS research and empower communities to impact public health policies.

"This grant validates the important work of the CEG and will allow us to continue to conduct state-of-the-art environmental research at UC's Academic Health Center and Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center," says Ho, Jacob G. Schmidlapp professor and chair of UC's environmental health department, a University System of Ohio (USO) Center of Excellence.

Founded in 1992 by Daniel Nebert, MD, now a UC professor emeritus of environmental health, the CEG encourages research collaboration between basic and applied scientists, epidemiologists and clinicians seeking to understand the complex relationships between genetic predisposition to disease and environmental exposures.

Susan Pinney, PhD, professor of environmental health, serves as deputy director of the CEG. Alvaro Puga, PhD, an associate professor of environmental health, and Daniel Woo, MD, a professor in UC's department of neurology and rehabilitation medicine, are associate directors.

"Environmental chemicals and their potential health effects are increasingly part of the public consciousness," Pinney says. "This funding will allow us to respond to questions from the public with cutting-edge science."

Read the original here:
$8.7 million grant supports 'Gene-Environment Interaction' research

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