Welcome to the Center for Environmental Health Sciences at Dartmouth

Welcome!

Understanding the relationship between our environment and our health is a significant challenge for this and future generations. Scientists now believe that environmental agents play key roles in the development of many common illnesses, from heart disease and cancer to diabetes. For those who are genetically predisposed to a particular disease, interactions between genes and environment appear to be critically important in triggering or aggravating symptoms.

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

Center for Environmental Health Sciences at Dartmouth © 2001
This page was last modified on : Tuesday, 06-Jan-2009 12:35:33 EST

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