Understanding How Early Life Experiences Affect Children's Health
Official title: The ECHO Measurement Core: A Framework and Resource for Assessing Environmental Exposure and Child Health
Funded at Northwestern University · NIH-11115685 · Data updated 2026-11-12
This project helps create better ways to measure how environmental factors influence the health and development of children.
Quick facts
| Grant type | NIH-funded research |
|---|---|
| Study type | NIH-funded research |
| Funding institution | Northwestern University NIH-funded |
| Lab location | 1 site (Chicago, United States) |
| Project start | September 21, 2016 |
| Project end | May 31, 2030 |
| Funding year | 2025 |
| Award (this year) | $3,499,986 |
| NIH project number | 5U24OD023319-08 |
| Project ID | NIH-11115685 on NIH RePORTER |
Who could benefit from this research
✓Could help
This project primarily benefits the broader community of children and families participating in the larger ECHO Cohort by ensuring high-quality data collection.
✕Less likely to help
Patients not involved in the ECHO Cohort or similar large-scale environmental health studies may not directly benefit from this specific measurement development work.
What this research studies
Our environment plays a big role in our health throughout life, starting from childhood. This project is building a system to carefully and accurately measure how early life experiences and surroundings affect children's health and development. We are creating and improving tools to collect information in a way that is sensitive to different cultures and easy for families to participate in. This work supports a larger effort to understand these connections, helping to ensure that the information gathered from children and families is reliable and useful for future health discoveries.
Why it matters
Potential benefit: If successful, this work will lead to more accurate and comprehensive data collection in child health studies, ultimately improving our understanding of how to protect children from harmful environmental exposures.
How similar studies have gone: This project builds upon existing methods for measuring environmental exposures and child health, refining them for a large-scale, coordinated national cohort.
Where this research is happening
-
Northwestern University
Chicago, United States Active
Researchers
- Principal investigator: Gershon, Richard — Northwestern University
- Study coordinator: Gershon, Richard
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Multimethod detection of brain micro- and nanoplastics in Alzheimer’s disease
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ECHO Measurement Core: Tools to track environmental exposures and child health
A large NIH project at Northwestern builds better, culturally sensitive measurements to understand how early environmental exposures affect child health and development.
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About this research
- This is an active NIH-funded research project — typically early-stage science, not a clinical trial accepting patient enrollment.
- Some NIH-funded labs run parallel clinical studies or seek volunteers for related work. To check, contact the principal investigator or institution listed above.
- For full project details, budget, and progress reports, visit the official NIH RePORTER page.