The Center integrates faculty from two NYU campuses; the School of Medicine campus in Manhattan, and Sterling Forest in Tuxedo, New York, a research park located approximately 50 miles northwest of New York City. In fact, the NYU Center was the first NIEHS Center to have a freestanding facility dedicated to environmental health science research. Thus, unlike many universities that have matrix-based NIEHS Centers without a facility dedicated solely to environmental health research, our Center has had from its very beginning a distinct main campus. This created an environment where a number of researchers from diverse disciplines, such as molecular toxicology, environmental carcinogenesis, human exposure, and systemic toxicology, are based and interact on a day-to-day basis. This campus situation is a special feature of our Center that continues to provide extensive opportunities for collaborations and discussions either in structured meetings (e.g., journal clubs, Core group meetings) or informally (in the hallway or lunchroom). Its relatively small size and location in an environmentally friendly surrounding continue to foster collaboration. The Department of Environmental Medicine and Center also has 2 buildings of resident housing for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, which further promote intra-programmatic and inter-programmatic interactions among research cores.

Other Center members are located at the Manhattan campus predominantly because of their need to be close to the human populations they study. In order to maintain close contact with these Center members located at the Manhattan campus, extensive computer linkages and video conferencing facilities have been established through institutional support. These links between the Sterling Forest and Manhattan campuses offer special advantages to the Department's research and teaching programs. For example, our faculty meetings, journal clubs, and many seminars are interactively video-conferenced. The Center continues to grow and evolve by recruiting new faculty to NYU.

The Center consists of four Research Cores, as well as four Facility Cores and a Community Outreach and Education Program. The four research cores are:

1. Environmental Epidemiology
2. Human Exposure and Health Effects
3. Systemic Toxicology
4. Molecular Toxicology and Carcinogenesis

All Center investigators have primary appointments in one research core and secondary appointments are occasionally made to foster inter-core collaborative interactions (see Figure 1). These research cores constitute the framework in which the broad goals of the Environmental Health Sciences Center are pursued. This framework has provided an opportunity for Center members to enjoy a continued, steady increase in research funding, not only from NIH, but also from other research sponsors, such as the U.S. EPA, Health Effects Institute, Department of Defense, and Department of Energy. Thus, the NIEHS, through our Center, partners with these other agencies to enhance the support of environmental health science research. Total direct research funding for our Center members as of January 31, 2004 is approximately $12.5 million in direct costs, including our NIEHS Center and NCI Center funding. The four research cores of the NYU/NIEHS Center pursue the broad goals of the Environmental Health Sciences Center by conducting laboratory and epidemiological studies to:

1. identify and quantify occupational and general environmental risk factors contributing to the development of human dysfunction and disease;
2. identify biological and chemical markers for detection and quantitation of exposure to chemicals, in both the workplace and the ambient environment;
3. conduct research into understanding the molecular and physiological mechanisms of environmentally-related diseases;
4. develop improved in vivo and in vitro models for evaluation of the toxic effects of environmental pollutants;
5. develop ways for reducing the risks of disease from environmental pollution both before and after exposure has occurred; and
6. identify new modalities for intervention and protection against environmentally-induced disease.

Four newly configured Facility Cores support the peer-review funded research of the Research Cores. The facility cores are:

1. Analytical Services and Exposure Assessment
2. Environmental Health Statistics and Bioinformatics
3. Experimental Animal Services
4. Molecular and Cell Biology