It is acknowledged that climate change and environmental exposures threaten human health. However, not all human beings are equally exposed, and some groups, typically the socially and economically disadvantaged ones, experience much higher risks. The overall aim of the project is to explore environmental justice and its relationship with health impact in highly anthropized areas of high income countries using a life-course perspective. Exposures will be assessed prospectively and repeatedly over time starting form the first 1000 days of life. Information on health outcomes, including cardiometabolic and respiratory health, and neurocognitive development will be available from registries, questionnaires and/or biological samples. They will be studied as single or joint outcomes. The project will draw on a network of Italian birth cohorts collaborating to a project funded by the Italian Ministry of Health under a call on Health, Environment, Biodiversity and Climate. Collaborations with international cohorts are foreseen. Methodological aspects will involve geospatial methods for exposure assessment, statistical methods to deal with multiple environmental exposures data, social epidemiology concepts, and causal inference approaches to explore pathways linking social and physical environment to health outcomes. Lastly, the project will evaluate the impact of different policies and mitigation strategies entailing both health and environmental benefits.

Multidisciplinary attitude, basic knowledge in quantitative research (biostatistics, epidemiology, statistical software), interest in health inequalities, environmental determinants of human health and public health, teamwork, willingness to learn and acquire new skills

The research team includes a multidisciplinary group working on environmental, life-course, molecular and cancer epidemiology and includes, epidemiologists, biostatisticians, and molecular biologists. The team collaborates with a national network of birth cohort researchers and is member of the Italian Network for Environmental Health. It has access to birth cohorts, including NINFEA (www.progettoninfea.it) and Piccolipiu (www.piccolipiu.it). It is based at the Department of Medical Science, University of Turin, that is a large multi-disciplinary department with research interests that span from basic biological research through clinical application, encompassing 16 medical disciplines.