NIH Grant Funds International Training Center Led by UMDNJ and Rutgers

New Brunswick, NJ - A  new training facility in Thailand that will provide researchers with the opportunity to learn about the consequences of pesticide use and control technologies is being led by University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) and Rutgers University.

The International Training in Environmental and Occupational Health (ITREOH)is a multi-institutional, international training project through which UMDNJ and Rutgers and its partners provide environmental health research and education opportunities in Thailand as well as in New Jersey.  There are 57 faculty from 13 institutions involved in the project, including 14 from Rutgers. Mark Gregory Robson, director of the Rutgers New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station and professor of entomology, is the principal investigator and center director.

Pesticide use in Thailand increases more than 8 percent every year. There are few control measures in place for the proper use of pesticide products on farms that consider both human and ecological health.

“There is clearly a need for environmental health research and education in Thailand, particularly in the area of pesticide use,” Robson said. “This need has been increasingly recognized in the recent years by the Thai Government and the Thai scientific community. Through research capacity building in Thailand to address such a common and widespread environmental and occupational hazard, the proposed Thai ITREOH center will contribute beneficially to the society at large.”

The major theme of the program is to provide research and educational opportunities to learn about the consequences of pesticide use and control technologies in Thailand. The program will provide short- and long-term training opportunities in Thailand, opportunities for graduate students at Rutgers and UMDNJ to earn graduate degrees, and short-term training at Rutgers, UMDNJ and other collaborating institutions.

The program is the result of a long history of collaboration between Rutgers, UMDNJ and Thai colleagues. Robson has been collaborating in Thailand since 1995. He has been teaching in the international post-graduate programs for environmental and hazardous waste management at Chulalongkorn University since 2001. In 2003, Rutgers and UMDNJ sponsored a Research Symposium in Thailand to start the ground work for the development of this Fogarty Application. Since 2003, the research team has been working to develop ideas and linkages for the preparation of this proposal.

The project is now well under way. The ITREOH center hosted a series of workshops on environmental epidemiology in October 2007 and environmental risk communication at the National Center of Excellence for Hazardous Waste Management Program and at The College of Public Health Sciences both at Chulalongkorn in March 2008.  The March workshop featured Rutgers professors Robson and Caron Chess, a professor at the Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences and an expert in environmental risk communication; and Dr. Daniel Wartenberg, a professor at UMDNJ Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. This past week the Program partners met at NIH with investigators from 15 ITREOH other centers that are located around the globe.

Funding for the program includes the Fogarty International Center, NJAES, the UMDNJ-School of Public Health, Royal Jubilee Scholarships from the Thai Government and fellowships from the Centers for Disease Control. To learn more about this project, go to http://thaiitreoh.rutgers.edu/.