The Mission

The central mission of the CRGGH is to advance research into the role of culture, lifestyle, genetics and genomics in disease etiology, differential susceptibility to disease and variable drug response at the individual and population levels.

In service of its mission, the Center will have the following primary objectives:

1. Establish a scientific program to investigate the potential role of genetic and environmental factors in the pathophysiology of common complex diseases (e.g., obesity, diabetes and hypertension) and variable drug response that contribute to individual and population differences in disease distributions.
   
   
2. Continue to develop strategic research resources that will facilitate the study of genetic factors in disease susceptibilities in the United States and globally.
   
   
3. Build strategic genomic resources (biological samples, clinical, demographic, ancestral, socio-cultural and other epidemiological data) that capture the widest variation of the human genome (especially from Africa, the ancestral home of humankind) and provide access to this resource to scientists within and outside of NIH.
   
   
4. Investigate how knowledge and understanding of the role that genetics and genomics factors play in population differences in disease distribution could be translated into policy to reduce or eliminate health disparities.
   
   
5. Develop a comprehensive training program that will facilitate the engagement of United States and international students, postdocs and scientists in the use of genomic approaches in the study of human health and population differences in disease distributions.