UT Health Science Center at Houston to have key role in largest US children's study

Ken Sexton, Sc.D., professor and director of the Division of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, and Beatrice Selwyn, Sc.D., associate professor of epidemiology, will lead the School of Public Health effort to study the impact of the environment on Harris County children.

The UT Health Science Center at Houston will receive $3.5 million from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to fund its efforts.

"Due to the strengths of our clinical research programs in obstetrics and neonatology, with the leadership of Drs. Susan Ramin and Kathleen Kennedy and our strong partnerships with the Memorial Hermann Healthcare System and Harris County Hospital District, we are able to be key players in the National Children's Study for Harris County," said Blackwell. "This is a unique opportunity for collaborations among investigators from different disciplines. We are very fortunate to have such an infrastructure as the Center for Clinical and Translational Sciences, which I hope will facilitate these efforts."

To conduct the research, the UT Medical School at Houston and the UT School of Public Health will be working with Baylor College of Medicine, which is the lead institution for Harris County, and The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

"Being awarded the NCS grant is a wonderful opportunity for the Houston community. It is absolutely terrific to have joint collaboration among the various medical institutions," said Susan Ramin, M.D., Emma Sue Hightower Professor and chair of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at the medical school.

The National Children's Study is led by a consortium of federal partners including the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The most comprehensive academic health center in the Southwest, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston is home to six schools devoted to medicine, nursing, public health, dentistry, health informatics and graduate studies in biomedical science. In addition to the Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine for the Prevention of Human Diseases (IMM), other components are the UT Harris County Psychiatric Center and the Mental Sciences Institute.

The UT Health Science Center at Houston, founded in 1972, is part of the University of Texas System. It is a state-supported health institution whose state funding is supplemented by competitive research grants, patient fees and private philanthropy.