NIH Awards $8 Million to Southern California Center Studying Environmental Health Risks

An $8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health will sustain one of the country’s longest-running hubs for environmental health research, the Southern California Environmental Health Sciences Center, which is based at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and jointly operated with the University of California, Irvine. The award renews federal support for a center that has been continuously funded by the NIH for more than three decades, ensuring that investigators across Southern California can continue probing how pollution, extreme heat, wildfire smoke and industrial chemicals shape human health. For a region that has served as a living laboratory for air quality science since the mid-twentieth century, the renewal represents both a continuation of a storied research tradition and a deliberate pivot toward emerging threats, including artificial intelligence applications and the environmental roots of cancer.

The center, known as SCEHSC, has built its reputation on research with real regulatory consequences. Its scientists have supported studies of air pollution that proved highly influential in the development of regulatory standards, work that helped quantify the toll that traffic-related emissions take on children’s lungs and cardiovascular systems. Beyond air quality, the center’s portfolio now spans extreme heat and wildfires, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances known as PFAS, and the environmental determinants of cardiorespiratory health, neurodevelopment and cognitive aging, kidney and liver disease, metabolic dysfunction and diabetes. The new grant allows the center to continue backing these efforts through pilot funding, service cores that supply expertise in exposure assessment, study design, biostatistics and data science, and programs devoted to community engagement, research translation and science communication.

Rob McConnell, MD, professor of population and public health sciences at the Keck School of Medicine and director of SCEHSC, framed the renewal as an investment in a proven model of scientific incubation. Over the years, he noted, the center has helped researchers turn promising ideas into research programs that address some of the most pressing environmental health challenges, and the new funding will allow it to build on that track record while expanding into emerging areas of the field. His co-leadership team includes Lida Chatzi, MD, PhD, who serves as deputy director, and Joseph Leo Wiemels, PhD, who co-directs the center’s Translational Research Support Core and directs the doctoral program in epidemiology at the Keck School.

Among the center’s most consequential contributions is its role in developing the Children’s Health Study, a long-term investigation of air pollution and respiratory and metabolic health that has followed more than 12,000 children across Southern California. Because the cohort spans communities with sharply different pollution profiles, the study has offered some of the clearest evidence anywhere in the world that exposure to traffic exhaust and other airborne contaminants measurably impairs lung growth and metabolic health in children. Findings from this research have been used extensively by decision makers to shape air quality standards and other regulations at the local, state and federal levels, making the center one of the rare academic enterprises whose work can be traced directly into public policy.

The center’s infrastructure extends well beyond grant dollars. It provides laboratory facilities, career development programs, working groups and scientific retreats that help researchers develop and advance new ideas. With more than 50 members across USC and UC Irvine, the center places particular emphasis on supporting junior investigators. Since 2020, its Career Development Program has mentored 15 junior faculty members and 22 postdoctoral researchers. Those investigators have published 104 papers with center support as lead or senior authors, four have been promoted, and seven have secured tenure-track positions. Wiemels described the center as essentially a bespoke resource that investigators can access when they have an important environmental health question but need additional expertise, infrastructure or funding to pursue it.

Central to the center’s impact is its pilot program, which provides early funding and support to help investigators transform promising ideas into established research programs. The economics of the model are striking: the program has generated a 30-to-1 return on its investments, with modest pilot awards helping researchers attract substantially larger follow-on support, primarily from the NIH. In a field where preliminary data are often the gatekeeper to major grants, that leverage function makes the center a kind of venture catalyst for environmental health science, seeding the small, risky studies that later grow into programmatic research efforts.

The ShARP Center offers the clearest case study of that pipeline in action. The Southern California Superfund Research and Training Program for PFAS Assessment, Remediation and Prevention was established last year with a $14 million NIH grant to investigate the health effects of PFAS and develop strategies for prevention and remediation. It grew from years of preliminary research and collaboration supported by SCEHSC, which provided pilot funding for population studies examining PFAS exposure in relation to liver and metabolic disease, supported research mapping PFAS contamination in drinking water, enabled the collection, archiving and analysis of preliminary samples, and convened USC investigators and national experts to identify research priorities that ultimately helped shape the ShARP program. Chatzi said the center gave her team the opportunity to take some of their earliest observations about PFAS and human health and build them into a much larger translational research program, one now moving beyond identifying associations toward understanding how these chemicals affect human biology and developing strategies to reduce exposure and prevent their health effects.

Other recently funded pilot projects illustrate the breadth of questions the center is willing to back at an early stage. Current projects include studies of the health effects of last year’s destructive urban wildfires, the effects of extreme weather on radon exposure, the capacity of cool roofs to reduce the impacts of extreme heat, environmental influences on adolescent brain development, and potential ways to mitigate PFAS-related liver damage. Because the center maintains research infrastructure in place, it can also respond quickly to pressing community concerns, including environmental disasters. After the Lineage fire, which burned for seven days at a Boyle Heights warehouse in June, the center’s Community Engagement Core supported community members in collecting air and water samples, and the center funded time-sensitive pilot projects to launch studies of the fire’s potential health effects, beginning with sample analysis to determine what chemicals may have been released and spread through the surrounding community.

That rapid-response capacity reflects a philosophy that McConnell described as central to the center’s mission: community engagement means listening to the concerns that people are experiencing firsthand and making sure those needs shape the research the center supports. The approach inverts the traditional top-down model in which academic scientists choose their questions in isolation. In Boyle Heights, a densely populated neighborhood adjacent to industrial corridors and freight routes, residents’ worries about chemical contamination after the warehouse fire became the impetus for federally supported sampling and analysis within weeks rather than years, a speed that conventional grant cycles rarely allow.

The renewed funding will also push the center into two new domains. The first is artificial intelligence: SCEHSC is bringing AI expertise from USC’s Information Sciences Institute into environmental health research, including through new collaborations with Yolanda Gil, PhD, research professor of computer science and spatial sciences at the Viterbi School of Engineering, and Deborah Khider, PhD, a lead data scientist at ISI. Machine learning methods hold particular promise for exposure assessment, where vast streams of sensor, satellite and electronic health record data can be fused to estimate what people breathe, drink and touch at unprecedented resolution. The second expansion targets cancer: the center is broadening its work on environmental exposures linked to cancer in children and adults in collaboration with the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center. Together, the moves signal a center that, after more than thirty years of continuous NIH support, intends to spend its next chapter connecting environmental science to the frontiers of computation and oncology, while keeping its founding commitment to communities living on the front lines of exposure. The research is supported by NIH grant P30ES007048.

Subject of Research: NIH funding for environmental health sciences research on pollution, PFAS and related exposures

Article Title: $8 million NIH grant advances research on environmental health

Article References: $8 million NIH grant advances research on environmental health. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: NIH grant, environmental health, air pollution, PFAS, USC Keck School of Medicine, Children's Health Study, pilot funding, wildfire smoke, extreme heat, artificial intelligence, cancer research, community engagement