Advancing Science, Improving Health: A Plan for Environmental Health Research. National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences 2012-2017 Strategic Plan.

摘要

NIEHS research provides the critical scientific foundation for essential public health and disease prevention activities. The more we know about environmental exposures and how they affect health outcomes, the greater our ability to create healthy environments and improve our health by reducing or preventing hazardous exposures. NIEHS research informs policy decisions related to disease prevention at all levels: individual, community, national, and global. At all these levels, NIEHS supplies leadership to those interested and working in environmental health sciences. In this document, we present a set of descriptive strategic themes, as well as a collection of more specific strategic goals. NIEHS, with the help of our stakeholders, has identified these themes and goals as priority areas for the field. The themes are a more general description of the areas, within the field of environmental health sciences, that NIEHS recognizes as important domains for targeted efforts that support the NIEHS mission and vision. As illustrated in the diagram on the previous page, all six of the core themes together with the two crosscutting themes are highly integrated and overlapping, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of environmental health sciences. The themes give context to the goals, which are the more tightly focused areas identified as priorities by NIEHS, on which we expect to see progress over the next 5 years. As implementation of the strategic plan goes forward, the themes will define the playing field and the goals will be the actual areas of focus and resource allocation. Some of these priority goals represent current strengths of NIEHS for others, the Institute has identified new directions for the field that will answer novel questions and require state-of-the-art capabilities.