The Children's Environmental Health Initiative (CEHI) is a research, education, and outreach program committed to fostering environments where all people can prosper. CEHI oversees multiple environmental research projects emphasizing the special vulnerabilities of children. CEHI projects focus on incorporating innovative spatial analysis in combination with field-based sampling into children's environmental health research. CEHI maintains a deep institutional commitment to issues of social justice and thus focuses much of its work in low income and minority communities.
By using spatial design of environmental health research, CEHI's long-term vision is to forge a whole new approach to addressing children's environmental health issues. CEHI has developed and maintains and extends an extensive fully spatially referenced data architecture on children's environmental health. This makes it possible to jointly consider diverse variables collected by different disciplines, creating the opportunity to explore the complex and dynamic relationships among the components of health. Thus, CEHI works collaboratively across disciplines to develop sound and systematic methodologies for assessing and analyzing the causal interactions and pathways through which the environment, host, and social domains operate in a child's life.