NIH Awards $1.78 Million ‘Roadmap’ Grant to Duke Center for Geospatial Medicine

Funding will support development of powerful new analytic tools for studying how genetic, environmental and social factors combine to affect children’s health

Friday, October 1, 2004 | DURHAM, N.C. -- Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences has received a $1.78 million National Institutes of Health grant to launch the Duke Center for Geospatial Medicine. The grant was awarded by NIH’s Roadmap Initiative, which promotes research in new or emerging fields of critical importance to future medical and scientific progress.

Scientists at the new center will combine expertise in psychology, geospatial technology, molecular biology, genetic epidemiology, genomics, behavioral science and spatial statistics to craft powerful new tools to study the interplay of genetic, environmental and social factors that drive children’s health outcomes.

The center’s initial study will focus on understanding how these factors combine to cause neural tube defects.

“What researchers need – and what our center will work to provide – are wholly new methods for assessing the factors’ simultaneous, combined influence,” says Marie Lynn Miranda, Gabel Associate Professor of the Practice in Environmental Ethics and Sustainable Environmental Management and director of the Children’s Environmental Health Initiative at the Nicholas School.

“The tools currently at our disposal to do this type of research are rooted in different disciplines and typically study each factor in isolation,” she explains. Miranda will serve as principal investigator and director of the new center.

The methods advanced at the center could be applied to studies of other childhood health problems such as autism, asthma, ADHD and obesity, she says. They also could be extended to adult conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, psychiatric disorders and cardiovascular disease.

A key component of the new methods will be their use of advanced spatial statistical techniques and Geographic Information Systems applications.

To support its interdisciplinary approach, the center will leverage research partnerships among the Nicholas School, the Duke University Medical Center and Trinity College of Arts and Sciences.

Jonathan H. Freedman, associate professor of environmental toxicology at the Nicholas School, and Marcy C. Speer, associate professor at the Center for Human Genetics and the Departments of Medicine, Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, and Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, will serve as the center’s co-directors.

Alan Gelfand, professor of statistics, Christina Gibson, assistant professor at the Sanford Institute of Public Policy and Redford Williams, professor of psychiatry, will be serve as co-investigators.

The Duke NIH grant was one of four such grants awarded to Triangle researchers. Three researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill also received NIH funding. They are Barry Popkin, professor of nutrition at the Carolina Population Center, Daniel A. Reed, Kenan Eminent Professor and director of the Institute for Renaissance Computing, and Ryan B. Sartor, professor of medicine.

Note to editors: Marie Lynn Miranda can be reached for comment at (919) 613-8023 or mmiranda@duke.edu. For additional assistance, contact Tim Lucas, Nicholas School media relations specialist, at (919) 613-8084 or tdlucas@duke.edu.