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 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 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.
