Collaboration on birth outcomes and changing climate receives international award

 Latest news from the Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health 

Allan Just, PhD, from the Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health (EMPH) at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Itai Kloog, PhD, from the Ben-Gurion University of Negev in Israel and Adjunct Professor in EMPH, are collaborating on a new research program focused on temperature variability, air pollution, and birth outcomes in a changing climate. This work will be undertaken in collaboration with Joel Schwartz, PhD, from the Harvard School of Public Health and is funded by the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF).

Pregnancy is a time of heightened susceptibility, but epidemiologic studies have not yet clarified how much and when extreme temperatures may elevate the risk of adverse birth outcomes. This study aims to better estimate short and long term exposure to increased temperature and heat stress as well as improve models to understand the underlying associations by: 1) enhancing high-resolution temperature and air pollution models, 2) developing novel statistical models to better estimate windows of susceptibility for adverse birth outcomes and 3) analyzing the joint effect of both temperature and air pollution on adverse birth outcomes. Using satellite remote sensing and innovative exposure modeling, this robust and generalizable big data project for understanding the links between climate and health will cover the entirety of two large population-based registries with hundreds of thousands of births.

The U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF) promotes scientific relations between the U.S. and Israel by supporting collaborative research projects in a wide area of basic and applied scientific fields, for peaceful and non-profit purposes. Eligible projects must demonstrate outstanding scientific merit and clear collaboration between Israeli and American researchers from institutions throughout the two countries.

About The Institute for Exposomic Research

The Institute for Exposomic Research at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai is the world’s first research institute devoted to the intensive study of the exposome, or the totality of environmental influences on human health. The mission of the Institute is to understand how the complex mix of nutritional, chemical, and social environments affect health, disease, and development later in life and to translate those findings into new strategies for prevention and treatment. For more information, visit http://icahn.mssm.edu/exposomics.