YSPH Dean's Lecture: "Planning Future Directions for Environmental Health Sciences"

With Dr. Rick Woychik as Director, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) research is reshaping our understanding of how the environment impacts human health in order to promote healthier lives, and providing global leadership for innovative research that improves public health by preventing disease and disability.

The NIEHS is one of the 27 institutes or centers that comprise the United States National Institutes of Health. In this presentation, Dr. Woychik will address the six NIEHS emerging scientific priority areas as future directions for environmental health science, including: the exposome, climate change and health, precision environmental health, mechanistic and translational biology/toxicology, environmental justice and health disparities, and computational biology and data science. In conclusion, he will highlight environmental justice activities across NIEHS and emphasize the importance of future research strategies aiming to reduce environmental health disparities.

About the Speaker

Dr. Rick Woychik was named Director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Toxicology Program on June 7, 2020, after serving as Deputy Director since 2011. He is a molecular geneticist with a Ph.D. in molecular biology from Case Western Reserve University and postdoctoral training with Dr. Philip Leder at Harvard Medical School. He spent almost 10 years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory rising in the ranks to become head of the Mammalian Genetics Section and then director of the Office of Functional Genomics. In August 1997, he assumed the role of vice chairman for research and professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Case Western Reserve University. In 1998, he moved to the San Francisco Bay area, first as the head of the Parke-Davis Laboratory for Molecular Genetics and then as chief scientific officer at Lynx Therapeutics. He returned to academics as the president and CEO of The Jackson Laboratory in August 2002 and served in that role until January 2011.