Systems Analysis & Modeling for Environmental & Health Decision-Making
The overarching goal of the Health & Environment Assessment Team (HEAT)’s work is to understand the accumulation, transport, transformation, and effects of chemical substances in a nexus encompassing the human socio-economic system, built and natural environments, and various living organisms including humans.
The HEAT strives to establish, foster, maintain and promote a holistic, mechanistic computational modeling system, comprising a variety of widely accessible, highly integrative, and internationally recognized models, databases, and best practice methodological approaches. This work fuses interdisciplinary approaches from environmental sciences, chemistry, industrial ecology, and exposure and health sciences, seeking to inform academia, industry, and regulatory agencies to battle with the environmental and health issues arising from the production and use of chemical substances.
The HEAT strives to establish, foster, maintain and promote a holistic, mechanistic computational modeling system, comprising a variety of widely accessible, highly integrative, and internationally recognized models, databases, and best practice methodological approaches. This work fuses interdisciplinary approaches from environmental sciences, chemistry, industrial ecology, and exposure and health sciences, seeking to inform academia, industry, and regulatory agencies to battle with the environmental and health issues arising from the production and use of chemical substances.
Currently, the HEAT is keen to answer the following intriguing and important questions.
>> How can we assess the environmental and health risks brought about by tens of thousands of commercial chemicals in an efficient and reliable fashion?
More than 100,000 chemical substances are manufactured and consumed to support and sustain modern lifestyle. However, a considerable portion of them has been found to be hazardous to the ecosystem and human health. They are simply the tip of an iceberg, as more environmental and health threats are believed to be lurking in our chemical-intensive society. Clearly, it is close to impossible to evaluate the environmental and health impacts of these chemicals one by one using traditional low-throughput approaches, notably targeted instrumental analyses and in vivo assays. For this reason, the HEAT strives to develop robust computational models that integrate in silico and in vitro methods to portrait the overall picture of the hazard, exposure profile, and risk of the myriad of chemicals. These models attempt to explain how chemical properties, environmental conditions, and human behaviors and decisions interactively determine the environmental and health impacts of chemical substances. The HEAT also addresses the uncertainties associated with the parameterization, algorithm, and applicability domain of computational models.
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>> How do our body and health respond to chemical contamination in the environment?
The human body is rather like a highly technical and sophisticated machine, which absorbs, re-distributes, metabolizes, and excretes various wanted and unwanted chemical substances all the time. Leveraging the state of sciences in computational exposure sciences, physiology, and toxicology, the HEAT has been constructing a virtual person, who can either be a man or woman, a senior or child, a White, Black, or an Asian, a vegetarian or omnivore, an urbanite or not, etc. to simulate the complex interactions between the environment, chemicals, and the human body. Such virtual persons allow the HEAT to observe how chemical contamination in the environment impacts chemical occurrence inside the human body and, furthermore, human health status. The HEAT conducts various analyses to figure out who in our society are most susceptible to chemical exposure and hazard. The HEAT also explores what will happen to our health if an environmental policy comes into force at different times or in different ways.
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