Materializing the Exposome: The Center of Excellence for Exposure Health Informatics

NIEHS Exposure Science and the Exposome Webinar Series
March 11, 2020
NIEHS

Purpose

The NIEHS Strategic Plan places a significant emphasis on transforming exposure science through the development of new approaches to exposure assessment, the definition and dissemination of the exposome concept, and the development and demonstration of the exposome as a tool for both epidemiological and mechanistic research. In order to achieve this goal, NIEHS launched the Exposure Science and the Exposome Webinar Series on April 4, 2014 to foster discussions on international efforts in advancing exposure science and the exposome concept as well as challenges and opportunities in incorporating this concept in environmental health research.

Abstract

Comprehensive quantification of effects of the modern environment on health requires taking into account data from all contributing environmental exposures (exposome) which can span endogenous processes within the body, biological responses of adaptation to environment, physiological manifestations of these responses, and socio-behavioral factors. A more complete understanding of air pollution calls for integration of data from wearable and stationary sensors, environmental monitors, personal activities, physiology, medication use and other clinical data, genomic and other biospecimen-derived, person-reported and computational models, accommodating variable spatio-temporal resolutions and accounting for multiple study, experimental and analytical designs.

We established a Center of Excellence for Exposure Health Informatics (CEEHI) that will serve as a go-to collaborative for continuing investigations into state-of-the-art informatics methods for exposomics, and for researchers interested in conducting sensor-based, mobile and virtual exposure health studies. CEEHI seeks to advance the informatics infrastructure, Exposure Health Informatics Ecosystem (EHIE), derived from federally funded NIH/NIBIB PRISMS program, by the use of an ultra-large-scale infrastructure for integrated sensor monitoring systems, advance the use of novel sensors, and support the management of research processes and data for activities related to the study and its operations. EHIE consists of sensor data acquisition pipelines, participant and research facing tools, computational modeling frameworks, and big data integration platforms. In this presentation, we discuss CEEHI and EHIE, and its evolution towards a generalizable multi-scale and multi-omics ecosystem providing robust pipelines for using real-time, low-cost air quality sensors based reproducible exposomic research.

About the Speakers

Ram Gouripeddi, M.B.B.S., M.S., is an Assistant Professor in Department of Biomedical Informatics, and an Associate Director of Research of Center of Excellence for Exposure Health Informatics, University of Utah.

Julio Facelli, Ph.D., is a Professor and Vice Chair of Department of Biomedical Informatics, Associate Director for Biomedical Informatics, Center for Clinical and Translational Science, and Co-Director of Center of Excellence for Exposure in Health Informatics, University of Utah.

Katherine Sward, R.N., Ph.D., FAAN, is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Nursing in the Department of Biomedical Informatics and College of Nursing, and Co-Director of Center of Excellence for Exposure in Health Informatics, University of Utah.