The Southern California Environmental Health Sciences Center (SCEHSC, scehsc.usc.edu) is pleased to announce the 2018 Pilot Projects Program, supporting one-year research projects that aim to promote the understanding of environmental exposures and human disease. The goal of the program is to provide investigators with an opportunity to collect preliminary data and/or validate the utility of specific methods or techniques to establish the feasibility of larger-scale research projects and ultimately seek external (especially NIEHS) funding.

The SCEHSC is seeking investigator-initiated applications from all environmental health research areas.  Topics of special interest include:

•   New Approaches for Exposure Assessment
• New Approaches for Environmental Disaster Response Research
• Climate Change and Environmental Health
• Environment, Neurodevelopment, and Neurological Diseases
• Environmental Contributions to Obesity and Metabolic Dysfunction
• Application of Metabolomics to Environmental Health Research
• Complex Mixtures in Environmental Health
• Human Microbiome and the Environment
• Individuals with a faculty appointment in any department or school/division at USC, CHLA, UCLA, or Caltech are eligible to apply.Request for Applications (RFA)
  Prospective applicants will submit a one-page letter of intent (LOI) and a one-page summary of Specific Aims (SA).  The LOI will include the project title, a brief summary of project objectives and identification of the key participating investigators.  All proposed projects should have a clear and identifiable environmental health emphasis.

  Please e-mail Letters of Intent and Specific Aims by the LOI deadline to lisa.wolff@usc.edu. Successful LOI applicants will be invited to submit a full proposal.  Instructions for full proposal submission can be found on the SCEHSC website under the Pilot Projects tab:  https://scehsc.usc.edu

Deadlines and Notification Schedule
October 2, 2017 at 5 PM: Letter of Intent and Specific Aims Due
October 16, 2017: Invitations to Submit Full Application Sent
November 6, 2017 at 5 PM: Full Applications Due
January 2018: Award Notifications Sent
April 1, 2018: Award Start Date