The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, a branch of the National Institutes of Health, will allocate $4 million to establish the Chicago Center for Health and Environment.
Here are three things to know.
1. NIEHS will disperse the funds to the center over four years.
2. University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago will operate the center through a partnership.
3. Researchers at the center will focus on understanding and reducing the racial and ethnic health disparities in the South and West Sides of Chicago, where environmental pollutants are significantly more prevalent.
"Our two institutions, with overlapping strengths, will work closely together to mitigate disparities in environmental health," said center co-director Habibul Ahsan, MD, the Louis Block Professor of Epidemiology, Medicine and Human Genetics at the University of Chicago. "We will focus on the biological, social and economic connections between urban environmental exposures and human disease, and apply the knowledge we gain to the reduction of health inequities."
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