One of the core objectives established at the outset of Network for Exposomics in the United States (NEXUS) is to advance global and community engagement within the field of exposomics. Since September 2024, when the NIH-wide exposome research coordinating center launched, the NEXUS team has worked to foster several long-standing collaborations and engagements in the United States and around the globe. NEXUS aims to develop impactful partnerships across the field of exposomics, and public health in an effort to advance its mission, and solve some of the most pressing health challenges of our time.
In the United States, NEXUS has cultivated impactful partnerships with key research networks advancing understanding of environmental impacts on health and disease and the tools and methods needed to accomplish this goal. One such partnership is with the “ CAFÉ” Climate and Health Research Coordinating Center (RCC), which is jointly led by principal investigators Gregory Wellenius, ScD, Boston University School of Public Health, Amruta Nori-Sarma, PhD, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Francesca Dominici, PhD, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “CAFÉ” represents the four functions, Convene, Accelerate, Foster, Expand that drive the mission of the center, which is to “… build a Community of Practice by managing and supporting climate and health research and capacity building efforts.”1
NEXUS and CAFÉ are exploring collaborations around curating, hosting, and disseminating geospatial datasets and best practices for modeling climate-related environmental exposures such as extreme heat and weather events, wildfire smoke, and more and linking these to participants in health studies to examine impacts on health. These discussions are in joint partnership with the Connecting Health Outcomes Research and Data Systems ( CHORDS) project at National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) which “…aims to build and strengthen data infrastructure for patient-centered outcomes research on environment and health.”2
The CHORDS Catalog provides accessible data and geospatial modeling and exposure linkage tools for environmental factors, exposures, and health outcomes. NEXUS MPI and Geospatial Sciences Hub co-Lead Dr. Habre and CAFÉ Data Management Function Co-Lead, Kevin Lane, PhD, Boston University School of Public Health, serve as Technical Expert Panel members for CHORDS, which has also helped catalyze deeper coordination efforts around environmental data standards and harmonization with the Environmental Health Language Collaborative ( EHLC), and scalable methods and datasets for characterizing the external environment with leading exposomics researchers.
The Gateway Exposome Coordinating Center ( GECC) is another important effort funded by the National Institute of Aging ( NIA), which aims to facilitate collaboration and consensus-building across disciplines and serve as a hub for collecting, organizing, and sharing exposome data for AD/ADRD research. The GECC is led by principal investigators Jinkook Lee, PhD, University of Southern California, Sara Adar, ScD, University of Michigan School of Public Health, and David Knapp, PhD, University of Southern California.
Recently, NEXUS MPI Dr. Habre and NEXUS co-investigator Carlos Cardenas-Iniguez, PhD, Keck School of Medicine of USC, participated in a workshop hosted by GECC in Los Angeles, California. This meeting aimed to engage in deep discussions and prioritization of data domains and datasets for studies of the exposome and dementia across the lifecourse. NEXUS hopes to continue building upon this collaboration with the GECC and to facilitate cross-disciplinary collaborations and partnerships for understanding the role of the exposome in aging, Alzheimer’s Disease and AD-Related Dementias.
NEXUS’s collaborative network extends further with the Exposome in Autoimmune Disease Collaborating Teams “ EXACT”, which NEXUS has begun to work in partnership with. In March 2025, NEXUS MPI Gary Miller, PhD, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, Rima Habre, ScD, University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, and Chirag Patel, PhD, Harvard Medical School, presented to the EXACT group, and discussed opportunities for increasing training, collaborations and scientific resources available to integrate exposomics into autoimmune disease studies and cohorts.
EXACT “conducts research to discover the environmental exposures that influence disease susceptibility, onset, and outcomes and will develop a systems-level approach to understand the mechanisms underlying how exposures perturb cellular, organ, and tissue function across autoimmune diseases.”3
In 2024, the NIH announced Jane Buckner, MD, University of Washington, Wilson Liao, MD, University California San Francisco, Marc Natter, MD, Boston Children’s Hospital, Jill Norris, PhD, Colorado School of Public Health, John Pearce, PhD, Medical School of South Carolina, and Brigitte Frohnert, MD, PhD, University of Colorado School of Medicine as the EXACT-PLAN award recipients.
NEXUS is proud to continue building high-impact exposome research and partnerships with networks like The Human Health Exposure Analysis Resource ( HHEAR). HHEAR’s innovative framework for data measurement, collection, and analysis has generated invaluable datasets, with a particular focus on enhancing studies of younger populations from around the world. This emphasis on early-life exposures and data cataloging is critical, as it lays the groundwork for future investigations and infrastructure into how the exposome evolves as we age into the period of chronic diseases, ultimately informing — or promoting research to help — our understanding of aging.
This has all culminated in harmonized cohort data being deposited in the HHEAR Data Center, which is led by Susan Teitelbaum, PhD, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Inspired by the robust data model and infrastructure pioneered by HHEAR, NEXUS is dedicated to ensuring that the critical frameworks endure and remain accessible, including providing ExWAS analysis and secure compute for analysis of HHEAR cohorts and beyond.
NEXUS aims to connect with the exposome research community globally and has engaged in meaningful partnerships throughout Europe. One significant collaboration is with the Environmental Exposure Assessment Research Infrastructure ( EIRENE), the European Scientific Research Infrastructure ( ESFRI), that supports exposome research in Europe.
This project includes 20 universities in Europe, with Columbia University, the operational institution of NEXUS, as the sole non-EU participant. EIRENE comprises 22 National Nodes representing over 50 institutions and is led by Jana Klánová, PhD, of Masaryk University, who is also the principal investigator of RECETOX. EIRENE’s “…mission is to establish a sustainable research infrastructure enabling the advancement of exposome research in Europe by bringing together complementary capacities available in the member states, harmonizing them and upgrading to address current scientific and societal challenges in the areas of chemical exposures and population health research.”4
In January of this year, the NEXUS leadership team Drs. Miller, Patel, and Habre visited colleagues at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory-European Bioinformatics Institute ( EMBL-EBI) along with ESFRI and EIRENE project teams to explore how to integrate exposomics into existing genomic databases and workflows. The groups also discussed the opportunities and challenges involved with integrating exposomics data with genomics data in large, multi-site cohort studies along with opportunities for collaborating in educational programming.
Similarly, NEXUS is highly aligned with the International Human Exposome Network ( IHEN). IHEN, in part, builds off the European Human Exposome Network ( EHEN), which is an umbrella network of nine research projects funded by the European Union’s framework program for research and innovation.5
The IHEN initiative is coordinated by Roel Vermeulen, PhD, Utrecht University, and Martine Vrijheid, PhD, Instituto de Salud Global de Barcelona ( ISGlobal). The mission of IHEN is to “…build a world-wide network to collaborate and improve human exposome research. The network will bring together researchers, policymakers, and independent experts to enhance the impact of future studies in this field.”6
In October of 2024, shortly after the NEXUS grant was awarded, IHEN, EIRENE, and NEXUS convened in Utrecht, Netherlands to discuss the next steps in human exposome research and global coordination. This proved to be a critical meeting between research groups, and highlighted the alignment of their missions. In October of 2025, the three research groups are set to reconvene in Brno, Czechia to discuss further collaborations.
NEXUS is also proud to be a part of the organizing committee, and to support the inaugural Exposome Moonshot Forum, which is occurring May 12th through 15th in Washington, D.C. Organized by NEXUS collaborator Thomas Hartung, PhD, Johns Hopkins University, and Fenna Sille, PhD, Johns Hopkins, The Forum is plotting the future of the Human Exposome and aim to gather diverse stakeholders of industry, academia, and government to collaboratively identify new goals, clarify next steps, and translate the exposome from concept to utility. The Moonshot Forum will bring together global leaders in exposomics and will be an opportunity to further establish partnerships within the field, and make meaningful contributions and advancements to the study of the exposome.
NEXUS is committed to maintaining and strengthening these established collaborations, and welcomes new partnerships in the United States and globally in the field of exposomics.