Several areas of research stand at the centre of the work of the EHSI:

• Atmospheric pollution: The institute is researching how particulate matter, ozone, and heat impact health, including in urban contexts.
• Social determinates of health: Environmental pollution doesn’t affect everyone equally – poverty, education, living situation, and other social factors alter exposure and susceptibility to disease.
• Nutrition and gut microbiome:?The EHSI is researching how nutrition and the microbiome interact with environmental factors and so modulate health risks.
• Climate change and heat stress: Current projects such as “THERMAL-INTERACT” focus on the health risks associated with thermal stress and who is particularly at risk. ??

Teaching, cooperation & knowledge transfer

In addition to research, the EHSI will play an important role in teaching. Medical students receive in-depth knowledge about the significance and risks of environmental factors for health, raising their awareness of the effects of climate change or environmentally related disease burdens for their later career. Close cooperation with municipal partners, health authorities, and political decision makers will ensure meaningful scientific communication and knowledge transfer. In this way, research will not only be conducted in the laboratory, but will also be actively incorporated into politics, urban planning, and prevention.

“With the founding of the EHSI we are setting a strong signal: Environment and health are inextricably linked. In Augsburg, we have created an interdisciplinary centre that not only conducts research but is also actively influencing society,” said the Dean of Medicine, Prof. Dr. Martina Kadmon, at the ceremonial opening.

Significance for Augsburg and beyond

“Our institute is more than a scientific meeting place; it is a platform for innovation. By combining a whole range of disciplines such as environmental and climate science, epidemiology, toxicology, and biomedicine, we can more precisely research the complex interactions between environmental burdens and human health. Through this, we would like to identify new approaches to prevention and therapy,” explains the institute’s spokesperson, Prof. Dr. Christoph Knote.

The founding of the EHSI underscores the long-term commitment of Augsburg’s Faculty of Medicine to make environmental health a central topic of university medicine. With an interdisciplinary approach and the clear aim of quickly transforming research results into practice, Augsburg is positioning itself as a nationally as well as internationally significant location for future-orientated research in environment and health.

Coinciding with the launch of the EHSI, three new professors have been appointed, who belong to the EHSI.

1. Prof. Dr. Christoph Knote, Chair of Model-Based Environmental Exposure Science, heads model-based research into air pollutants, their sources, and their transport and effects on the human body.
2. Prof. Dr. Elke Hertig,?Chair of Regional Climate Change and Health, combines geographical knowledge with medical issues, researching how regional climate phenomena influence human health.
3. Prof. Dr. Evelyn Lamy, Professor of Research into Environmentally Related Mechanisms of Action on Health, focuses on molecular and biological mechanisms that due to environmental factors favour disease.

Further professorships will be appointed in the near term. In the long term, the faculty's strategy envisages eight key professorships covering the broad field of the Environmental Health Sciences.

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