The Southern California Environmental Health Sciences Center (SCEHSC) was established in 1996 to promote more and better environmental heath research in Southern California. The Center consists of faculty from both USC and UCLA. I direct the Center, and John Peters serves as the Deputy Director. John Froines of UCLA is the Associate Director.

The theme of the SCEHSC is Environmental Exposures, Host Factors and Human Disease. The goal of the SCEHSC is to improve health by identifying environmental risks, genetic co-factors and other susceptibility determinants for disease and ill health. To accomplish this the SCEHSC has and will continue to: 1)develop and refine methods for exposure and health outcome assessment, 2) develop informative study designs for addressing risks of environmental exposures, including gene-environmental interactions, 3) investigate environmental exposures in diverse human populations, and 4) link its research efforts with the environmental health needs of the communities it serves.

The primary disease outcomes of interest are cancer, respiratory disease and adverse reproductive outcomes. Correspondingly, there are research cores on respiratory effects, cancer, exposure assessment, and study design and statistical methodology. There are three facility cores supported by the Center: Molecular Biology, Sample Processing, and Storage; Biostatistics; and Exposure Assessment and GIS. The Center also supports a strong Community Outreach and Education Program (COEP) directed by Andrea Hricko.

Each year the SCEHSC supports approximately six pilot projects, leading to the collection of preliminary data, or establishing the feasibility for major federal funding. The SCEHSC also has been very successful at spawning several important new activities at UCLA and USC. Early activities in the Exposure Assessment Research Core led by John Froines laid the groundwork for the successful applications for the Southern California Particle Center and the Supersite based at UCLA. Center-sponsored initiatives on asthma led to the establishment of a Program Project grant from NIEHS extending the research activities of the Children’s Health Study and establishing new directions in gene-environment interactions on asthma etiology at USC.

COEP activities involve environmental health education in elementary, junior and senior high schools, educational workshops for school nurses and community members, as well as community-based participatory activities. In addition, this outreach and education program has provided useful information to community groups and policy makers on the environmental health implications of the expansion of the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports (already the biggest U.S. port complex and expected to be three times bigger by 2020).