Motivation
Human disease is increasingly recognized as caused by a combination of heritable and non-heritable factors. Recent advances in technology, across disciplines such as metabolomics and bioinformatics, allow greater characterization of environmental encounters contributing to disease risk. This session focuses on environmental health research which advances the field through the development of techniques/infrastructure which facilitate the use and collection of environmental data and promote new discoveries concerning environmental risk factors
Session Topics
We hope to draw a diverse sampling of papers to showcase cutting edge research across environmental and biomedical disciplines. Topics under the purview of this session include, but are not limited to:
- Integration of exposure data with other ‘omics’ measures, such as the genome and proteome, for a multi-faceted look at complex diseases and health
- Statistical, algorithmic, or computational methods dealing with challenges in exposome data analysis, e.g. accounting for the complex correlation structure of exposures, repeated measures and longitudinal data, risk factor heterogeneity, identification of interactions or aggregate environmental risk factors, and Mendelian randomization approaches
- Best practices for environmental data collection and standards for the assessment of exposure data quality
- Research which leverages the metabolome and/or microbiome to characterize the environment; applications of electronic medical records to environmental health research
- The collection and/or storage of environmental data, from biomarker analysis to wearable devices and home-based sensors; utilization of novel exposure biomarkers (microRNA, exosomes, etc.) or alternative samples for environmental measurements
- Initiatives to collect holistic, longitudinal data, the development of infrastructure (databases, ontologies, etc.) or software/tools for exposure research, and enforcing reproducibility and replicability in the field
- Issues concerning data privacy and security as related to collection of personal environmental data
Session Organizers
Kristin Passero – The Pennsylvania State University – kxp642@psu.edu
Shefali Setia Verma – University of Pennsylvania – shefali.setiaverma@pennmedicine.upenn.edu
Kimberly McAllister – National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences – mcallis2@niehs.nih.gov
Arjun Manraj – Harvard Medical School – manrai@post.harvard.edu
Chirag Patel – Harvard Medical School – chirag_patel@hms.harvard.edu
Molly A. Hall – The Pennsylvania State University – mah546@psu.edu