About
About the CHARMED Center
A university-wide hub for community-focused environmental health research across the greater Maryland region.
Residents of the greater Maryland region — extending north from Washington, DC through Baltimore, MD and including central Pennsylvania — face a complex range of environmental health concerns related to pollutants from a wide variety of sources.
The mission of the Johns Hopkins NIEHS P30 Core Center for Community Health: Addressing Regional Maryland Environmental Determinants of Disease is to build capacity in community-engaged research aimed at understanding the mechanistic links between environmental exposures and adverse health outcomes, and to translate these findings into action to improve the health and well-being of vulnerable individuals in communities across the region.
The CHARMED Center builds partnerships between communities and environmental health stakeholders — environmental regulatory agencies, advocacy groups, and nonprofit organizations — to address their environmental health concerns. CHARMED provides training, support, and access to environmental health experts and state-of-the-art technologies to facilitate the creation of lasting community–investigator partnerships.
Although the Center is based in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering, which spans the Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Whiting School of Engineering, it is a university-wide hub for community-focused environmental research at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland.
Members come from schools and departments campus-wide: Public Health, Biostatistics, Population, Family and Reproductive Health, Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Sociology, Earth and Planetary Sciences, and Materials Sciences and Engineering.
Why the greater Maryland region
Where pollution and poor health overlap.
Environmental exposures and related health problems are not spread evenly across Maryland. They cluster in specific communities, reflecting longstanding differences in housing, land use, infrastructure, and industrial development. The MD Environment Screen dashboard, developed by members of the CHARMED Community Engagement Core, captures these patterns: Baltimore City's pollution burden score is 1.6 times the state average. The same pattern appears in life expectancy — Baltimore City residents live 5.7 fewer years than the state average (73.0 vs. 78.7 years), and estimates for individual census tracts range from 62 to 90 years.
The greater Baltimore region is one of the state's most overburdened areas, with among the highest rates of air pollution–related deaths in the nation: an estimated 130 deaths per 100,000 residents each year are linked to long-term exposure to air pollution. Baltimore residents also face higher exposure to lead, pesticides, metals, and PFAS than residents of other similarly sized U.S. cities. In rural parts of the state, industrial food animal production facilities add further risks, including asthma, infectious diarrhea, cardiovascular and respiratory disease associated with arsenic exposure, and the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Because Maryland brings urban, rural, industrial, and agricultural communities together in a compact area, it is a powerful setting for studying how pollution interacts with housing quality, land use, development, and infrastructure — and for building coordinated, place-based solutions with the communities most affected.
How the Center works
One structure connecting science, funding, and community.
An Administrative Core Executive Committee ties together the three Facility Cores, the Thematic Research Groups, and the Pilot Project Program, so a question raised by a community partner can become a funded study whose results go back to that community.
- ULC
- EAC
Each reports to the Administrative Core
Thematic Research Groups
- Two-way link with CEC
- Feeds into Administrative Core & Executive Committee
- Two-way link with IHSFC
- Two-way link with Pilot Project Program
Pilot Project Program
- Two-way link with Thematic Research Groups
- Feeds into IHSFC–ECMC connection
- Two-way link with ECMC
IHSFC
- Two-way link with Thematic Research Groups
- Two-way link with CEC
- Two-way link with ECMC
ECMC
- Two-way link with IHSFC
- Two-way link with Pilot Project Program
- Feeds into Administrative Core & Executive Committee
- Two-way link with CEC
two-way link · one-way link
- CEC
- = Community Engagement Core
- IHSFC
- = Integrated Health Sciences Facility Core
- ECMC
- = Exposure Characterization and Modeling Core
- TRGs
- = Thematic Research Groups
Facility Cores
Scientific expertise and support for community-engaged research.
The Center houses several Facility Cores providing the expertise required to conduct community-engaged environmental health research.
Integrated Health Sciences Facility Core
Turns community concerns and research ideas into high-quality studies, convenes community and scientific advisors around each project, and makes sure results get back to the people who raised the question.
Learn moreExposure Characterization and Modeling Core
Provides exposure assessment across air, water, soil, and biological samples — sensor deployment, laboratory characterization, spatiotemporal modeling, and help interpreting the data.
Learn moreCommunity Engagement Core
Builds authentic, lasting partnerships with communities across the region through workshops, training, symposium sessions, and shared environmental health resources.
Learn morePilot Project Program
Led by Thomas Hartung, MD, PhD, Professor of Environmental Health and Engineering. Annual pilot project awards are available to the university community to facilitate and support community-engaged projects that address community environmental concerns. Through a rapid-response process with a 48-hour turnaround, funds can be deployed quickly to address more emergent needs of community–investigator teams.
Read about the Pilot Project ProgramInterested in joining?
We encourage investigators with an interest in community-engaged research focused on improving the environmental health of our communities to join Center activities: Environmental Health Stakeholders Board (EHSB) meetings, monthly Thematic Research Group meetings, career development opportunities, and the annual retreat.