The IHSFC provides University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) investigators access to environmental health, epidemiology, biostatistics/informatics, and research translation resources to substantially advance their capacity to study adverse health effects of environmental exposures and broadly communicate their research findings. The IHSFC will play a key role in advancing the overall goal of the EaRTH Center, which is to accelerate the pace of discovery and prevention of environmental exposures that affect reproduction and development to improve human health across the lifespan.
The IHSFC provides project consultation, education, and outreach to scientific, clinical, and patient communities. Services include consultation on study design and patient questionnaires to evaluate environmental exposures; expertise and access to a database to identify chemicals of interest for evaluation; computational advice on analyzing complex environmental exposures and psychosocial stressors; and translation to key audiences.
Many investigators at UCSF are eager to study the effects of environmental exposures on health outcomes, but lack the tools and expertise to methodologically approach this area of investigation. The IHSFC provides critical resources to support researchers who want to add interdisciplinary approaches to investigate, analyze, and disseminate findings in diverse fields of environmental health, including epidemiology, biostatistics, bioinformatics, geographical information systems (GIS), developmental toxicology, public health, and environmental health sciences.
The Integrated Health Sciences Facility Core provides:
- technical assistance in study design including sample size determination, data collection and integration, database management, and questionnaire design. In addition, we will provide consultation on data analysis, analysis of high-dimensional data, ‘omics’ integration, and GIS.
- assistance with chemical selection and measurement, including expertise on mouse genetic models, developmental biology, high-throughput screening approaches, and toxicity evaluation.
- expertise in culturally appropriate Spanish translation of study materials and communications.
Core Leadership
Dr. Peggy Reynolds, Erin DeMicco
IHSFC Consultants
John Boscardin, PhD
Lynn Harvey
Allison Landowski, MPH
Joshua Robinson, PhD
Marina Sirota, PhD
Tracey Woodruff, PhD, MPH