Exploring Environmental Impacts on Health

Over the next five years, Associate Dean of Research Arcot Rajasekar will work with a team of scientists and researchers across the country to advance the understanding of environmental drivers of health and disease. The project is the Network for Exposomics in the U.S. (NEXUS). It is being overseen by Columbia University and is funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Exposomics is term introduced in the early 2000s to describe the study of the totality of environmental exposures a person experiences throughout their life and how those exposures affect their health.

The project abstract states that the NEXUS team “will strive to transform the entire biomedical and public health enterprise by inculcating the importance of comprehensive and systematic analysis of the environmental drivers of health and disease.”

Rajasekar will head the UNC-CH team looking at geospatial exposomics. This is the area of study that looks at physical, chemical, biological and social influences that a person experiences from birth to death.

“Genomes only account for around 20% or so of disease,” said Rajasekar. “Most other diseases are acquired from exposure to other things—from unique and sudden events like a hurricane to a mix of chemical influences. We try to find the pathways of what can happen in life and what impacts that.”

The field is fueled by new technologies that allow for the analysis of large data sets. The goals of the project include creating an exposomics data clearing house for researchers.

Learn More:

National Institutes of Health Project Details

Story from Columbia University

About Arcot Rajasekar

Dr. Arcot Rajasekar is Associate Dean of Research and Professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS) and a Chief Scientist at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI). Previously he was at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, leading the Data Grids Technology Group. He has been involved in research and development of data grid middleware systems for over a decade and is a lead originator behind the concepts in the Storage Resource Broker (SRB) and the integrated Rule Oriented Data Systems (iRODS), two premier data grid middleware developed by the Data Intensive Cyber Environments (DICE) Group.

A leading proponent of policy-oriented, large-scale data management, Dr. Rajasekar has several research projects funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Archives, National Institute of Health and other federal agencies. He has more than 150 publications in the areas of data grids, digital library, persistent archives, logic programming, and artificial intelligence. His latest projects include the Datanet Federation Consortium and DataBridge, building a social network platform for scientific data.

Related Research Areas: Health Informatics