But the most pressing questions in the environmental health sciences are dauntingly complex - far too complex to yield to the narrow perspective of a single discipline. To determine how a substance in the environment may harm humans requires knowing where it comes from and how it moves through natural ecosystems, how it gets into people and how it interacts with the biological molecules that regulate their bodies. It also requires understanding the individual differences - in genetics, lifestyle, occupation, other exposures - that make some people more vulnerable than others to an environmental exposure.

Dartmouth's Center for Environmental Health Sciences fosters the kind of collaborative, integrated science that can turn these questions into solutions for the environmental health problems of communities, local and global. We believe that communicating what we have learned, by training future scientists and by participating in public outreach, is essential to that goal.

We have four major aims:

• to examine at the molecular level the mechanisms linking the environment to human health and disease and to develop methods to detect, control and prevent environmentally-related illness
  
  
• to create a collaborative culture that prepares a new generation of young investigators to work at the interface of scientific disciplines
  
  
• to shorten the distance between basic research and its applications by addressing questions that are of direct concern to the public
  
  
• to share our scientific findings and expertise with the public, to provide free access to information resources and to participate in public education