Mission
The mission of the MIT
Center for
Environmental Health Sciences
(CEHS) is to take a leadership role in facilitating and promoting
research into the biological effects of exposure to environmental
agents in order to understand, and predict, how such exposures affect
human health. 
As shown in the
adjacent figure, three fundamental components influence the health
effects of environmental exposures: the nature of the exposure itself,
the duration of that exposure, and how well the exposed organism is
equipped to deal with the exposure, in other words, the
organism’s
genetic susceptibility. These are the broad-brush strokes of
what
Environmental Health Sciences research is all about. As
Director
and Deputy Director of the CEHS, Professors Samson and Dedon believe that it is
their role to identify and bring together appropriate MIT faculty
members who are doing top-notch research that is relevant to the
Environmental Health Sciences. To this end, the goals of the
MIT
CEHS are to achieve the following: one, to create an intellectual hub
(and sub-hubs) that will foster multidisciplinary approaches to
Environmental Health research questions; and two, to support
centralized resources and facilities for groups of investigators that
would be impractical, implausible or impossible for individual
investi-gators to support and maintain. We are currently
expanding our overall mission to address Global Environmental Health
issues. Toward this end the MIT CEHS, along with the Johns
Hopkins Center in Urban Environmental Health, plans to launch a Global
Alliance that will start with the Chulabhorn Research Institute in
Thailand and the National University of Singapore and which will
hopefully grow to include a number of developing countries,
particularly in Asia.
