PHILADELPHIA — Penn's Center of Excellence in Environmental Toxicology (CEET), is part of a consortium that has been awarded $7.85 million from National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) to determine seafood safety following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The consortium is led by the Environmental Health Sciences Core Centers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB).

Edward Emmett, MD, professor of Occupational & Environmental Medicine, will co-lead the Community Based Participatory Based Research Project (CBPR) and the Community Outreach and Dissemination Core (CODC). Emmett is an authority on the principles and practices that underlie the CBPR approach and will use this to translate possible human health concerns from the oil spill to affected communities. Trevor Penning, PhD, CEET director, will co-lead the project's investigation on the toxicological properties of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from the oil, and will focus on how they are metabolized and whether they mutate DNA, which could lead to cancer and birth defects.

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