The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has secured a significant $4.5 million, five-year K12 award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to launch a cutting-edge training program focused on advancing women’s health research. This initiative, known as the Mount Sinai Life-course Exposomics Analytic Program (LEAP) in Women’s Health, stands out as an innovative leap forward in preparing early-career researchers to investigate the complex interplay between environmental exposures and women’s health across the entire lifespan.
Under the leadership of Dr. Rosalind J. Wright, MD, MPH, a renowned figure who serves as Dean for Public Health and Chair of the Department of Public Health at Mount Sinai, LEAP uniquely integrates exposomics into its framework. Exposomics—a burgeoning field that studies the comprehensive environmental exposures from conception onward—offers transformative insights into how such exposures shape health trajectories and disease development. Importantly, LEAP represents the NIH’s only active women’s health research training program funded in New York State, amplifying Mount Sinai’s role as a national pioneer.
The advent of exposomics represents a paradigm shift in biomedical research, moving beyond genetic determinants to consider the sum total of environmental factors influencing human health. LEAP will equip a new generation of scholars with sophisticated training in life-course theory, exposure science, epidemiology, and data science. These disciplines collectively enable the identification and quantification of diverse exposures—ranging from chemical pollutants and nutritional factors to social determinants—and their effects on women’s unique biological and physiological pathways.
Each year, LEAP will support three junior faculty scholars, offering advanced mentorship and resources to foster their development as independent investigators. This support system is designed to bridge gaps in current research training by emphasizing interdisciplinary collaboration. LEAP scholars will engage with experts from a wide array of fields, including obstetrics and gynecology, environmental medicine, psychiatry, genomics, biomedical engineering, and artificial intelligence. Such cross-pollination is intended to fuel innovative approaches for dissecting the multifactorial causes of diseases that disproportionately or differently affect women.
The focus on life-course exposomics is particularly timely given the growing recognition that environmental exposures impact health outcomes well before clinical symptoms emerge. Dr. Wright underscores that women’s health encompasses not only reproductive conditions such as endometriosis, menopause, and gynecologic cancers but also diseases that display sex-specific patterns in prevalence or severity, including cardiovascular disease, pulmonary disorders, metabolic syndromes, and mental health conditions. LEAP’s research training will emphasize unraveling how environmental insults and protective factors accumulate, interact, and manifest across various stages of a woman’s life.
To navigate the data-intensive nature of exposomics, the LEAP program places a strong emphasis on data science techniques. Scholars will leverage advanced computational tools to manage large-scale datasets, conduct exposure assessments, and perform predictive modeling. Through this approach, the program aims to go beyond correlation and towards causation, elucidating mechanistic pathways by which environmental exposures contribute to disease onset and progression in women.
The collaboration with Mount Sinai’s multidisciplinary experts enriches the program substantially. Integration with genomics and biomedical engineering fosters a systems biology approach, combining molecular insights with environmental context. Concurrently, access to Mount Sinai’s clinical population provides a diverse and representative sample for epidemiological studies, emphasizing translational research with real-world applicability. By aligning training with the institution’s established strengths in environmental health and women’s health, LEAP is positioned to generate discoveries that can reshape preventative strategies and therapeutic interventions.
Eric J. Nestler, MD, PhD, Interim Dean of the Icahn School of Medicine and Nash Family Professor of Neuroscience, highlights that Mount Sinai’s legacy in environmental health research creates a fertile ground for this new training program. The institution’s pioneering work has illuminated how environmental factors contribute to disease susceptibility, making it an optimal hub to integrate exposomics within women’s health research. LEAP will not only produce tomorrow’s leaders in this field but also accelerate scientific advancements with the potential to transform clinical care for women worldwide.
The K12 program model employed by LEAP provides a structured yet flexible platform for early-career scientists to cultivate independence while benefiting from robust institutional support. This includes access to state-of-the-art laboratories, computational resources, and cross-disciplinary mentorship that spans biomedical and social sciences. LEAP scholars will be encouraged to adopt innovative methodologies, including integrating artificial intelligence algorithms to analyze complex environmental exposure patterns—a step that could revolutionize personalized medicine in women’s health.
Mount Sinai’s status as a leading research institution is further reinforced by the LEAP award. Ranked 11th nationwide in NIH funding, the school boasts a vast network of more than 4,500 scientists, educators, and clinicians dedicated to translational research and therapeutic development. This environment amplifies the impact of training programs like LEAP by fostering collaborations that transcend traditional academic silos and by facilitating the rapid translation of research insights into clinical practice.
Women’s health research is undergoing a critical evolution, moving towards a more nuanced understanding of how biological sex and gender intersect with environmental influences throughout an individual’s life. Programs like LEAP epitomize this evolution by emphasizing interdisciplinary research training grounded in exposomics and life-course perspectives. By doing so, this initiative holds promise to unlock new preventive and therapeutic horizons that address health disparities and improve outcomes for women globally.
Through the Mount Sinai Life-course Exposomics Analytic Program, the future cadre of scientists will be uniquely empowered to tackle complex questions surrounding women’s health in an increasingly interconnected and data-driven research landscape. Their work will be crucial in deciphering how cumulative and interacting exposures shape aging, disease susceptibility, and health trajectories, ultimately informing tailored interventions that reflect the diversity and complexity of women’s lives.
As the LEAP program gets underway, it exemplifies how targeted federal funding can catalyze innovative research training that bridges cutting-edge science with public health imperatives. By investing in early-career investigators dedicated to women’s health and exposomics, the NIH and Mount Sinai are jointly charting a course towards a future where environmental exposures are comprehensively understood and mitigated, leading to healthier women and healthier communities worldwide.
Subject of Research: Women’s health research focusing on life-course exposomics and environmental exposures.
Article Title: Mount Sinai Launches Innovative NIH-Funded Program to Train Next Generation of Women’s Health Researchers in Exposomics
News Publication Date: October 15, 2025
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Keywords: Environmental health, women’s health, exposomics, life-course theory, epidemiology, public health, data science, interdisciplinary research, personalized medicine, NIH K12 award
