Phenotyping and Environmental Modifiers Facility Core

Project Summary – PEMFC Our Phenotyping and Environmental Modifier Facility Core (PEMFC) organizes Mount Sinai’s extensive environmental epidemiology, clinical research, psychometric, data science and technical expertise as a key Center resource. Since its inception in 2014, the PEMFC has evolved to guide selection of age-appropriate valid and time effective, low burden approaches to measure health and disease across the lifespan with a focus on particular critical periods or life stages (pregnancy, infancy, early childhood, adolescence, midlife, elderly). This includes Center supported space and phenotyping equipment covering a growing list of identified target priority areas (obesity, respiratory, allergy, sleep, renal, cardiovascular, endocrine and psychological phenotypes). The Core also facilitates research aimed toward more fully elucidating the impacts of key interactions between chemical toxicants and environmental modifiers, specifically many nonchemical environmental determinants (psychological stress, social networks, lifestyle factors etc) and nutrition. A related focus is the elucidation of mechanisms underlying health problems observed in our local communities around Mount Sinai as well as those occurring across the country. In this next cycle, we will promote growth in large-scale population-based environmental health research, phenomics, and decentralized phenotyping. Our P30 Center sits within a health system comprised of 8 hospitals and over 400 practices that uses a unified Epic electronic health record (EHR). This allows us to leverage an integrated clinical data warehouse linked with unique biobanks, providing an unprecedented foundation for integrating our healthcare delivery and data science efforts to generate novel environmental research- especially addressing ultraprocessed food chemicals and chronic diseases. Coupling this with our expertise in estimating environmental exposures (ambient pollution, built environment etc.) capturing spatio-temporal variability and incorporating timescales ranging from days to years, we can accelerate large-scale place-based health research. We will also harness significant institutional infrastructure in digital health (apps, wearables) and data science (machine learning) to facilitate decentralized phenotyping. The scope of responsibility for the PEMFC includes: 1) developing, maintaining and providing access to pediatric and adult health assessments that include self-reports, observational data, and performance-based measures; 2) tailoring protocols to specific research needs; 3) advising psychometric analyses including the use of multiple phenotypes in a phenomic or true multivariate analysis; and 4) providing access to unique covariates from high-resolution and well-validated geospatial datasets. The PEMFC curates measures together with a summary of the psychometrics as well as detailed protocol(s) for data collection, data reduction and scoring procedures, and incorporation into analyses.