Read about the latest updates, releases, and announcements from the GECC.
After a review process, the Gateway Exposome Coordinating Center selected five pilot projects from a pool of 63 applications to receive funding this cycle. The selected projects include:
The National Institute of Aging (NIA) recently published a “2025 NIH Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias Research Progress Report: Advances and Achievements,” featuring the Gateway Exposome Coordinating Center (GECC).
The report spotlights GECC's work fostering collaboration and accelerating life course research on the social, behavioral, psychological, and economic exposures that shape Alzheimer’s and related dementias outcomes. It highlights the Center’s interdisciplinary work and its efforts to produce accessible, quality data for AD/ADRD researchers.
To read the full mention of the GECC, you can
access the full report on the NIA’s website and navigate to the “Spotlight: Social determinants of health and the exposome” section.
Alzheimer's & Dementia and the Gateway Exposome Coordinating Center (GECC) invite submissions for a special issue dedicated to interdisciplinary research on the exposome and Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and AD-Related Dementias (ADRD) risk, resilience, and disparities. This special issue will include research articles, short reports, review articles, and policy forums on the emergent, growing field of exposomics, focusing on how an expansive conceptualization of the exposome — the various environmental exposures over the life course — influence brain health and dementia outcomes.
Submissions are encouraged to explore sources of risk including, but not limited to, the physical, chemical, natural, social, political, and economic dimensions of the exposome and their interplay with each other. Papers in the special issue will advance and complement the GECC’s mission of facilitating collaboration and consensus-building across disciplines, and serving as a hub for interdisciplinary exposome research, deepening our understanding of risk and resilience for AD/ADRD.
Submissions open July 1, 2025. The submission deadline is March 31, 2026. All papers will undergo peer review and are subject to the standard author guidelines.
On March 10-13, 2025, the Gateway Exposome Coordinating Center (GECC) convened over 80 experts in Los Angeles, California to set research priorities in exposome science and its intersection with Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and AD-Related Dementias (ADRD).
The workshop’s primary goals were to identify gaps in AD/ADRD and exposome literature and, from these gaps, select priority focuses to guide the GECC’s future outputs. To address these goals, the GECC workshop leveraged interdisciplinary collaboration. Throughout the week, researchers from different domains and disciplines intermingled to discuss priorities and share methodological approaches. This structure ensured that the priorities that came out of the workshop were both informed by specialized expertise and enriched by multidisciplinary perspectives – reflecting the GECC's commitment to addressing the exposome as an integrated system rather than a collection of isolated domains.
Many of the initial gaps identified at the workshop’s outset and during subsequent discussions require innovations in how exposome data is produced and shared. To address this central focus, the workshop developed plans to maximize its reach through high-impact publication, sharing resources through open-access data platforms, and targeted engagement strategies for training and dissemination of research products.
Overall, the GECC workshop was a testament to the power of interdisciplinary collaboration, bringing together experts across aging research, social and environmental sciences, and public health to advance exposome science. The workshop laid the groundwork for a research agenda that is both ambitious and pragmatic, recognizing the complexity of exposome science while identifying concrete steps to advance the field.
In the fall of 2024, the GECC hosted a series of six town hall meetings to build consensus from experts and other stakeholders on what topics are the most important for those studying Alzheimer's Disease and related dementias (AD/ADRD) and the exposome. Bringing together nearly 300 unique participants from 130 organizations across 21 countries, these meetings yielded critical insights that will guide the GECC’s efforts over the next five years. These insights will inform priority research areas for the GECC to create new resources and tools for researchers studying the exposome and its impact on brain health.
Hosted virtually on Zoom, participants began by suggesting key factors that may influence our communities’ risk of, resilience to, and disparities in Alzheimer’s and dementia. Breakout sessions then formed around these topics for participants to have focused discussions.
There were many shared themes across the town halls that were salient to all GECC domains. Three of the most resounding, overarching themes were (1) interdisciplinary collaboration, (2) innovative methodologies, and (3) development of novel measures. In addition to these shared takeaways, each domain identified key areas of focus for their future research.
Collaborative notes were taken, and made publically available for download, to ensure that these discussions will help guide participants and the GECC to set priorities for future scientific research and policies related to brain health.
The GECC will host another round of town hall meetings in 2027 to review progress on our initial priorities and identify new priorities that have arisen in the interim.
The GECC’s first town hall meeting on October 9th was a resounding success, bringing together 127 participants from 64 organizations across 13 countries to generate insights on the influences of brain health.
Participants discussed themes including:
Feedback from participants will directly inform the GECC’s future efforts, helping us prioritize research areas, create new resources, and develop tools that will benefit the broader community.
To engage with the GECC’s future activity be sure to:
Register for our future town hallsThe ambitious project will study influences on dementia risk and resilience as varied as pollution, education and policy.
Backed by a $25 million, five-year federal grant from the National Institute on Aging, USC’s Center for Economic and Social Research (CESR) is launching an ambitious investigation into the complex matrix of factors that feed into developing — or being protected from — Alzheimer’s and other related forms of dementia.
This matrix, or “exposome,” refers to all environmental exposures and corresponding biological responses experienced by an individual throughout his or her life.
Exposome research examines risk and resilience influences as varied as pollution, education or policy, with the goal of understanding how resulting biological changes may lead to disease. For example, previous research at USC has shown that exposure to fine-particle pollution, or PM2.5, leads to Alzheimer’s-like brain changes in humans. Other research shows how education may improve the brain’s ability to withstand damage that leads to dementia.
Understanding Alzheimer’s “exposome” is “increasingly urgent”
“Understanding how these exposures impact health and contribute to Alzheimer’s disease is increasingly urgent as the global population ages,” said principal investigator Jinkook Lee, director of the program on global aging, health and policy at CESR. CESR is based at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
Lee’s project, known as the Gateway Exposome Coordinating Center (GECC), will spearhead development of enhanced data and collaboration across disciplines to identify which aspects of the exposome affect dementia risk and how these can be mitigated.
“This center is an excellent exemplar that interconnects several of USC’s ‘moonshots’ — from health and computing to sustainability. This center further expands on other efforts of this team on the global stage such as the Longitudinal Aging Study in India, another USC priority,” said Shrikanth “Shri” Narayanan, vice president for presidential initiatives at USC.
“Efforts such as Lee’s exposome project have positioned USC at the top of U.S. universities in National Institutes of Health neuroscience awards,” said Ishwar K. Puri, senior vice president of USC’s Office of Research and Innovation. “With cutting-edge international collaborations and four prominent research centers, we believe we can get out in front of Alzheimer’s and prevent or stall the disease.”
The GECC’s efforts will bring together leading researchers from USC and other institutions, alongside key government agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency. This interdisciplinary collaboration is crucial for identifying priority areas and shaping future research in the field, Lee said.
“Collaboration is a cornerstone of the GECC,” said David Knapp, a senior economist at CESR who is co-leading the project with Lee and Sara Adar from the University of Michigan. “We are fostering consensus-building among researchers and stakeholders from diverse fields, ensuring a broad, inclusive approach to understanding the exposome’s role in dementia.”
Expanding long-running data project
The GECC project is an expansion of the Gateway to Global Aging Data, a long-running project with $24.7 million federal grant from the National Institute on Aging. The Gateway to Global Aging Data is a public resource for longitudinal and cross-national studies on aging over 42 countries around the world, offering data, information and tools to stimulate global aging research.
The GECC project joins another recently launched, large-scale collaboration on Alzheimer’s and dementia that is also anchored at USC.
Julie Zissimopoulos, a professor at the USC Price School of Public Policy and the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics, is leading an effort to build a dementia cost model that will generate comprehensive national, annual estimates of the cost of dementia. The project, funded by an $8.2 million grant from the National Institute on Aging, could benefit patients and their families.
To contact us, email us at: contact@gatewayexposome.org
The GECC is funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) U24AG088894.