The Southern California Environmental Health Sciences Center (SCEHSC) has received an $8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to advance research on the health effects of environmental exposures. SCEHSC, which is based at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and has been continuously funded by NIH for more than 30 years. The center has supported research on air pollution that has been highly influential in development of regulatory standards, on extreme heat and wildfires, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and on environmental effects on cardiorespiratory health, neurodevelopment and cognitive aging, kidney, liver and metabolic disease, and diabetes. The new grant ensures the center can continue backing these and other efforts through pilot funding, service cores providing expertise in exposure assessment, study design, biostatistics and data science, community engagement, research translation and science communication, and additional resources.
“Over the years, SCEHSC has helped researchers turn promising ideas into research programs that address some of the most pressing environmental health challenges. This new funding will allow us to build on that track record while expanding into emerging areas of environmental health research,” said Rob McConnell, MD , professor of population and public health sciences at the Keck School of Medicine and director of SCEHSC.
SCEHSC helped investigators develop the Children’s Health Study , a long-term study of air pollution and respiratory and metabolic health among more than 12,000 children across Southern California. Findings from the study have been used extensively by decision makers to shape air quality standards and other regulations at the local, state and federal levels.
SCEHSC provides key infrastructure—including laboratory facilities, career development programs, working groups and retreats—to help researchers develop and advance new ideas. With more than 50 members across USC and the University of California, Irvine, the center places a particular focus on supporting junior investigators. Through its Career Development Program, SCEHSC has mentored 15 junior faculty members and 22 postdoctoral researchers since 2020. These investigators have published 104 papers with center support as lead or senior authors, while four have been promoted and seven have secured tenure-track positions.
“The center is 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,” said Joseph Leo Wiemels, PhD , co-director of the SCEHSC Translational Research Support Core, professor of population and public health sciences and director of the doctoral program in epidemiology at the Keck School of Medicine.
Piloting new research
Central to SCEHSC’s impact is its pilot program, which provides funding and support to help investigators turn promising ideas into established research programs. The program has generated a 30-to-1 return on its investments, with pilot funding helping researchers attract additional support, primarily from NIH.
One example is the Southern California Superfund Research and Training Program for PFAS Assessment, Remediation and Prevention (ShARP) Center , which was established last year with a $14 million NIH grant to investigate the health effects of PFAS and develop strategies for prevention and remediation. The ShARP Center grew from years of preliminary research and collaboration supported by SCEHSC. The Center 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.
“SCEHSC gave us the opportunity to take some of our earliest observations about PFAS and human health and build them into a much larger translational research program,” said Lida Chatzi, MD, PhD , professor of population and public health sciences at the Keck School of Medicine, director of the ShARP Center and deputy director of SCEHSC. “We are now moving beyond identifying these associations to understanding how these chemicals affect human biology and, importantly, developing strategies to reduce exposure and prevent their health effects. That progression, from discovery to mechanisms to prevention, is exactly what a P30 Environmental Sciences Center like SCEHSC makes possible."
Other pilot projects recently funded by SCEHSC include studies of health effects of last year’s destructive urban wildfires, effects of extreme weather on radon exposure, cool roof reductions in impacts of extreme heat, environmental effects on adolescent brain development, and potential ways to mitigate PFAS-related liver damage.
Emerging health challenges
Because SCEHSC has research infrastructure in place, it can 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 SCEHSC 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, starting with sample analysis to determine what chemicals may have been released by the fire and contaminated the surrounding community.
“Community engagement is central to what we do,” McConnell said. “That means listening to the concerns that people are experiencing firsthand and making sure those needs shape the research we support.”
The new NIH funding will also allow SCEHSC to expand its work in two new areas in environmental health: artificial intelligence (AI) and cancer. The center is bringing AI expertise from USC’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI) into environmental health research, including through new work 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. SCEHSC is also expanding its work on environmental exposures linked to cancer in children and adults, in collaboration with the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center .
About this research
The Southern California Environmental Health Sciences Center is supported by the National Institutes of Health (grant # P30ES007048).