The HEALS Pilots Projects Program prioritizes career development through its pre-review program, in which mentors help improve grant applications from postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty prior to submission.
2023 marked the ten-year anniversary of the Center on Health and Environment Across the LifeSpan (HEALS) Pilot Projects Program. The Program bears a robust track record of providing seed funding for groundbreaking research that has identified key environmental drivers of human health. The 2024 cycle is now accepting new applications.
Since 2013, the Center has funded 94 pilot studies led by Mount Sinai postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty. In total, the awards have amounted to $2.8 million, representing a return on investment of nearly $50 million by way of larger grants received as a result.
“It’s been a great success,” says María José Rosa, DrPH, the new director of the HEALS Pilots Projects Program. “We’re at the forefront of exposomics. We’re driving a push to understand the totality of the environment by supporting great research from the bench to the clinic and enabling access to cutting-edge resources for exposure science, data science, and phenotyping to try to understand not only the chemical, but social environment. Because the environment impacts all diseases, we are bringing together researchers from disparate tracks to move research forward.”
In 2022, the Program funded research including a study that evaluated the health effects of flooding and increased West Nile Virus infections. Other HEALS Pilot Projects Program grant recipients examined the health of World Trade Center responders, including whether tailored light intervention can improve cognition and sleep. Several pilots focused on women’s health. One study examined whether polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) exposure affects ovarian reserve in mid-life.
Dr. Rosa now leads the program that helped jumpstart her career. In 2014, Dr. Rosa was a postdoctoral researcher who received one of the HEALS Pilots Projects Program’s first grants. She used the seed funding to travel to Mexico to investigate a possible link between prenatal exposure to air pollution and stress, and lung function in mid-childhood.
“I was very excited because that was the first grant I had ever submitted,” says Dr. Rosa, Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Dr. Rosa has since won larger grants and has published numerous papers based on the Mexico cohort.
The HEALS Pilots Projects Program is funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and awards grants of $20,000-$70,000. The Program prioritizes career development through its pre-review program, in which mentors help improve grant applications from postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty prior to submission. The Program funds at least one early career investigator application per cycle.
“It’s a great career development tool,” says Dr. Rosa.
Grant recipients gain access to a suite of world-class research tools inside the Center’s facility, including specialized equipment and methodologies capable of measuring a wide range of environmental chemical exposures and molecular biomarkers, as well as satellite-based remote air pollution and temperature sensing technology. Pilot researchers may also utilize the Center’s human study population data sets and learn how to run sophisticated data analyses to measure complex mixtures of environmental factors. Finally, the HEALS Pilots Projects Program helps grant recipients connect with community partners to allow research findings to improve lives as soon as possible.
“I’m invigorated to take the program in new directions, to make sure our submission process is smooth, and that we continue to build on partnerships and new collaborations,” says Dr. Rosa. “It’s an exciting time for generating new research.”