NIEHS Workshop: Catalyzing Knowledge-Driven Discovery in Environmental Health Sciences Through a Harmonized Language

The goal of this workshop is to advance the development and adoption of environmental health language standards through the formation of a sustained community effort. In this interactive workshop, participants will be charged to “think together” on two themes: 

• Build a Sustainable Community: Obtain agreement on the proposed Environmental Health Language Collaborative’s mission, community model, and strategy to build an impactful community. 
• Develop Solutions: Define use cases in environmental health sciences research and begin identifying semantic needs, gaps, and strategies for implementing solutions. 

An essential component to creating knowledge from data is to describe data with a harmonized language. Applying a harmonized language to environmental health data enhances its value by enabling consistent classification of data, increasing interoperability of databases, and promoting data sharing, reuse, and reanalysis; thereby, accelerating the pace of scientific discovery in environmental health science research. Join RTI and NIEHS in building a shared language with which to operationalize the vast amounts of incoming data currently being generated in our field.  

RTI Presentations

Use Case: Bridging Exposure and Biomarkers of Exposure 

12:00 p.m. ET, Facilitators: Steve Edwards, RTI and Chirag Patel, Harvard 

The facilitators will cover their use case profile, and explain or offer context surrounding the definition of their use case research question, why NIEHS is exploring the use case, the benefit of developing solutions around the use case, the intended output of the use case, the workshop goal for the use case and the proposed approach to achieve that goal, and any background and preparatory materials. 

Report Out: Use Case Work-a-Thons 

2:40 p.m. ET, Michelle Angrish, Carmen Marsit, Jeanette Stingone, Steve Edwards, and Chirag Patel 

Rapid-fire 10-minute presentations on the status of work, followed by discussion.

View the full agenda. 

About the Experts 

Rebecca Boyles is a Director and Senior Scientist in Research Systems and Data Management, focused on supporting Findable, Assessable, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) data across the research data lifecycle through trainings, consulting, and systems design. Her work involves data engineering, and the overseeing of architecture and FAIR data framework for cross-cloud, advanced cyberinfrastructure which brings together genomics workflows, community tools, secure workspaces, and data management functions into a unified ecosystem.  

Steve Edwards is a Bioinformatics Senior Scientist within the GenOmics, Bioinformatics, and Translational Research Center at RTI International in Research Triangle Park, N.C. For the past 20 years, he has focused on using computational approaches to better understand the mechanisms underlying disease and highlight interventions that could improve human health. His current research examines the combined impact of genetic and environmental factors on disease manifestation to better support both precision medicine and public health protection.