General Information
The Department of Environmental Medicine's Research Program in Human Exposure and Health Effects is focused on defining the relationships between human exposure to ambient and occupational air pollution and their health effects, with an emphasis on the physical and chemical components of exposure atmospheres and their specific influences on health-related indices.

Teaching
The graduate teaching program in Occupational and Environmental Hygiene at the M.S. and Ph.D. level is a component of the Environmental Health Sciences program at NYU's Graduate School of Arts and Science. It emphasizes research training focused on the anticipation, recognition, evaluation, and control of chemical and physical hazards in the general environment and workplace settings. The members of the Research Program in Human Exposure and Health Effects play major roles in this academic program.

Research Activities
The faculty, post-doctoral trainees and graduate students in this program area are addressing critical issues in the environmental health sciences. In recent research, they have made advances in exposure assessment include the development of a new technique for determining the number concentration of ultrafine acidic droplet aerosols and improved characterization of carbonaceous fine particles and their spatial variation within urban areas and in the regional northeastern U.S. background aerosol. They have also developed technologies and procedures to characterize the temporal day-to-day variations in ambient aerosol composition over extended periods of time in order to correlate such changes with the daily variations in health-related responses being observed in mice exposed to concentrated ambient air particulate matter (CAPs) in studies being carried out in collaboration with the Systemic Toxicology Research Program.

In terms of the characterization of health effects in human populations, this research group has extended its capabilities beyond studies that rely on non-specific mass concentrations of PM10 and/or PM2.5 to associations between mortality and morbidity and specific source-related pollution signatures for both acute and cumulative health effects. They are applying these new approaches to populations of particular concern, including asthmatic children in the South Bronx region of New York City and to residents of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn who were acutely exposed to dust and smoke following the collapse of the World Trade Center (WTC) buildings on September 11, 2001. This involves utilization of air samples that we were able to collect at the NYU Downtown Hospital (5 blocks east of the WTC) on a daily basis beginning on September 14, 2001, and (in a collaborative study with the New Jersey NIEHS Center) on satellite imaging and meterological modelling of the fine plume exposures and their effects on hospital admissions for residents of Brooklyn in the days following September 11, 2001.

Other notable strengths of the Program faculty include respiratory tract dosimetry and the modelling and analysis of temporal and spatial variations of air pollution exposure and other environmental variables that can influence, or confound, associations between measures of ambient air pollution and population based data on mortality and morbidity.

In summary, the mission of this Research Program is to identify the exposure related factors that play significant roles in the causation and/or exacerbation of disease associated with population exposures to air pollutants in community and/or work place settings. It also provides a forum and focus for innovative and multidisciplinary research directed at resolving the complex issues affecting both the exposure and response sides of the risk assessment paradigm. The opportunities for broadening the background knowledge and perspectives of the Program members are significantly enhanced by having frequent joint meetings with the members of the Systemic Toxicology Program of the Department, where opportunities are available to discuss hypotheses addressable by controlled inhalation exposures to concentrated ambient aerosols and/or realistic artificial atmospheres of suspect pollutant chemicals and mixtures.

Specific Program goals for the next five years are to:

1. Complete the ongoing analyses of the exposures and health effects attributable to the September 11, 2001 WTC disaster.
2. In collaboration with the Systemic Toxicology Program, to identify the specific ambient air constituents that correlate most closely with both the transient and persistent effects produced in both normal and atherosclerotic mice by subchronic exposures to CAPs.
3. Initiate and pursue studies that determine the role of the surface coatings on ambient air PM that may account for the ability of such relatively low particle mass concentrations to elicit significant impacts on mortality and morbidity in the general population.
4. Extend ongoing studies in the South Bronx region of New York City in order to determine the extent of the role that ambient air pollution (and especially traffic-related air pollution) plays in the extremely high prevalence of pediatric asthma and its exacerbation.

Core Leadership
Dr. Morton Lippmann, the Program Director for Human Exposure and Health Effects, received graduate training in industrial hygiene (S.M., Harvard) and environmental health science (Ph.D., NYU). He had nine years of research experience in industrial hygiene and aerosol science (two with the U.S. Public Health Service, five with the U.S. Atomic Energy Committee, and two with private industry) before joining the NIEHS Center at NYU in 1964. He has authored over 280 peer-reviewed scientific papers, reviews and book chapters on topics including exposure assessment, aerosol physiology, toxicology, epidemiology, and risk assessment. He has been either a member of, or chair of, numerous peer review panels for NIH, EPA, HEI, CIAR and DOE, of standing advisory committees for EPA, NIOSH and various university-based epidemiological research projects, and was co-chair of the fourth NIEHS Task Force on Research Planning in Environmental Health Sciences (1992).

Dr. George D. Thurston, the Associate Program Director, received a D.Sc. in environmental health science from Harvard University's School of Public Health and did further research on mortality associated with air pollution at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government before joining NYU in 1988. His research on air pollution and its health effects at NYU has focused on ozone and particulate matter through studies on panels of children in summer camps, in schools in the South Bronx, and adults with pre-existing chronic diseases, as well as on time-series analyses of hospital admissions and excess daily mortality, and on the influence of chronic exposures on longevity in numerous U.S. communities. He has peer-reviewed scientific publications and has chaired, or been a member of numerous scientific committees for the National Research Council, NIEHS, and EPA.