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 Essigmann and Engelward 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
investigators 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 University 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.
