Technical Support Services

Who We Are The Center for Environmental Health Sciences at Dartmouth fosters collaborative, cross-disciplinary research in the environmental health sciences. More than two dozen faculty direct Center research projects as principal investigators in research teams that include junior faculty, postdoctoral fellows, physicians, graduate students, medical students, undergraduate students and technical and support staff. Center members are affiliated with Dartmouth's College of Arts and Sciences , Thayer School of Engineering and Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, New Hampshire, and the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in White River Junction, Vermont.

Our Research Programs Our Center includes over 30 faculty scientists and their laboratories, working collaboratively on our various research programs. There are several different ways we have listed these collaborative scientific relationships within our Center, as shown in more detail in the following pages. At a structural level we are organized into three main Areas of Expertise: i.e., Molecular Toxicology, Epidemiology & Children's Health, and Health-Environment Interactions. Each of these areas of expertise includes scientists with common training and research approaches and focused around a common theme. At a scientific level, our Center researchers have self-organized into collaborative, interdisciplinary research teams that focus on specific problems, such as endocrine disruption. These teams typically include members from each of the three areas of expertise, in recognition of the complexities of these problems and the multi-disciplinary approaches that now are required to solve them. These specific research topics are listed under The Topics We Study. Also within our Center are several large program projects which consist of established multi-disciplinary teams. An example of this is our National Institutes of Health sponsored Toxic Metals Research Program which focuses on arsenic and other toxic metals in our region. These typically have their own large program project grants in recognition of the complexity of such studies. These are described in detail in the section on Integrated Research Programs. Finally, our Center provides support for our researchers through several Technical Support Services that provide specific support services through a dedicated professional staff, such as our Trace Elements Analysis Laboratory.

Our Collaborators We work with a number of institutions and agencies on research and outreach, including the Montshire Museum of Science in Norwich, Vermont; the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services; the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services; the Manchester (N.H.) Department of Health; the Diabetes Centers of New Hampshire; the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; and the U.S. Geological Survey.

Our Funding Support Funding for the Center's various research activities comes primarily from competitive research grants from federal agencies including the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the National Cancer Institute and other institutes of the National Institutes of Health; the National Science Foundation; the U.S. Department of Defense; the U.S. Department of Agriculture; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Private foundations including the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Association, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and the American Lung Association also fund our work.

Our Directors Molecular toxicologist Joshua Hamilton, Associate Professor of Pharmacology and Toxicology at Dartmouth Medical School, is Director of the Center. Ecologist Carol Folt, Professor of Biological Sciences at Dartmouth College, and epidemiologist Margaret Karagas, Associate Professor of Community and Family Medicine at Dartmouth Medical School, serve as Associate Directors.