Mission and Vision

The OSU Environmental Health Sciences Center studies how people can best protect themselves from environmental stress and toxicants by understanding sources of exposure and determining how to maintain natural defenses, which diminish as people age, to such stresses.  The greatest gains to be made in reducing the burden of human disease come from primary prevention of disease and improving the health-span of the elderly.

Our Center is an interdisciplinary unit of 34 investigators in its 43rd year. Our mission is to discover ways to prevent disease and improve human health by

1. Understanding biological responses to environmental stressors,
2. Clarifying the risks associated with exposures to environmental stressors at the low doses that people encounter in everyday life, and
3. Discovering how people can reduce their individual susceptibility to diseases caused by environmental stress.

The Center provides the technology, collaborations, and stability needed to foster innovation and tackle large, difficult experiments with enormous practical implications.