September 2022 Notes from the Director

Notes from the Director
September, 2022

The NIEHS continues to promote exposome research, an effort begun over a decade ago. In addition to the discussions at the Center Directors Meeting in July, the NIEHS held a series of virtual workshops titled “Accelerating Precision Environmental Health: Demonstrating the Value of the Exposome” over five weeks (July 22 – Aug 26). These workshops generated numerous discussions in small groups leading to several themes. These themes were then discussed in a 3-day virtual summit earlier this month aimed at operationalizing the exposome. A summary of the workshop discussions was distributed to CIEHS membership. Once a summary of the summit is available it also will be distributed. One thing that was brought to everyone’s attention is that other NIH Institutes are issuing notices of funding opportunities involving exposome, e.g NINDS. Members are encouraged to think how they might incorporate exposome into their research and take advantage of the current and upcoming opportunities. To this end, we emphasized exposome in the recent RFA for pilot project funding and will continue to do so with future RFAs.

Speaking of pilot awards, this latest round of awards will be funded by the C-RIF we received from the EVPRI. These funds are contingent upon the annual reports we receive from the membership. Please submit your report to if you have not done so already so that CIEHS will receive all that it is entitled to. This allocation does not affect the PI or department RIF allocations.

The UofL ‘Give Some L’ campaign will be launched soon. Once again CIEHS will ask for donations to the trainee travel fund. Donations will be matched by institutional funds allocated to CIEHS. will provide information on how to donate. An easy way is payroll deduction. Several of us chose this method last year. If every member donated $10/month CIEHS would provide 20 travel awards.

In other news, the annual UofL Research!Louisville event was held last week. Trainees in CIEHS member laboratories made a good showing winning several awards. Congratulations to the winners and their mentors.
The External Advisory Committee visit will be in December this year. The plan is for an in-person meeting, including a dinner at which members will have the opportunity to meet the Committee members. We solicited RSVPs earlier because we needed to make arrangements and commitments well in advance. Further information on the site visit will be distributed. We hope to see many of you showing your support by attending the presentations on December 13.