PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT
As a field, Environmental Health Science (EHS) spans a diverse set of disciplines and subdomains that
evaluate environmental fate and transport, human exposures, dosimetry, biochemical interactions, biological
effects, and adverse health outcomes. Although each of these research areas provides insight into the
impacts of chemicals that are in the environment, integration across these areas is needed to improve
interoperability across the source to outcome continuum (S2O). The S2O tracks chemicals from their release
into the environment to determine human exposure levels and then uses knowledge of toxicity mechanisms
to predict potential adverse outcomes resulting from these exposures. This project will build more-precise
semantic descriptions of physical and biological processes that make up the S2O to facilitate communication
among humans and computer models across EHS subdomains and support for public health decisions.
To accomplish this goal, we will engage data generators, computational modelers, public health decision
makers, and developers of data and metadata standards and terminologies (S&T). Based on the input from
these communities, we will expand S&T to better distinguish biomarker measurements from the biological
events those biomarkers represent and to better link environmental exposures to upstream chemical sources
and to downstream adverse outcomes. These efforts will be guided by a functional workflow that implements
the S&T improvements and tests their impact on human health outcome predictions. The resulting S&T
enhancements will provide long-term benefits to the EHS community by enabling analyses that span the
S2O, thereby improving our understanding of environmental impacts on human health.
In Aim 1, we will engage the EHS community to define the S&T requirements for data exchange between
neighboring subdomains. This aim will include the identification of opportunities and needs for S&T through a
series of workgroup meetings held with scientific domain experts, stakeholders, and S&T developers.
Aim 2 will focus directly on the expansion of S&T to better describe exposure and biological processes. The
Biolink Model, which currently underpins projects such as the NCATS Biomedical Data Translator, will be
used to integrate S&T across the S2O. S&T expansion in this aim will be guided by our community
engagement activities.
Aim 3 will develop a functional workflow for S2O analyses that will (1) identify gaps in existing S&T to guide
community engagement and S&T development, (2) provide a test system to evaluate the impacts of S&T
improvements, and (3) demonstrate how more precise language across EHS subdomains can enable
analyses that better inform public health decisions.