The goal of the UCSF Environmental Research and Translation for Health (EaRTH) Center is to solve the growing burden of chronic disease by accelerating the pace of identifying and preventing harmful environmental exposures that undermine health, reproduction, and human development.
By creating synergies between laboratory scientists, clinicians, and educators, the UCSF EaRTH Center is working to:
- Accelerate the pace of discovery of how chemical pollutants contribute to disease
- Develop interventions and preventive solutions to improve health across the lifespan, and
- Support vulnerable populations – including pregnant women and at-risk communities - who bear an unfair burden of pollutants and disease
Transforming the approach to studying harmful environmental pollutants that undermine health and human development and contribute to chronic disease and health inequities
Current approaches to uncover and address complex chronic diseases do not adequately incorporate the role of environmental factors, particularly during critical reproductive and developmental stages. Solving this complex problem requires partnerships across disciplines; mobilization of technology toward identification, intervention, and prevention; and education of future scientists, clinicians, and the public.
The EaRTH Center supports research in environmental health sciences with the Integrated Health Sciences Facility Core, Bioassay Facility Core, Community Engagement Core, and a Pilot Project Program that will increase environmental health research at UCSF. These Cores converge to understand how exposures during development influence disease and to intervene and prevent exposures to improve health throughout the lifespan, especially among vulnerable and underserved populations in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.
The EaRTH’s Center current membership of over 50 faculty spans all four UCSF schools and 16 disciplines and they are poised to promote and advance synergistic, multidisciplinary environmental health research.