The 2025 year marked key milestones for the Network for Exposomics in the United States (NEXUS), including expanded scientific collaborations, strengthened connections across scientific fields, and the development of the three NEXUS Hubs. This year, in particular, was characterized by key meetings and conferences that helped advance the field of exposomics, and provided an excellent opportunity for NEXUS members to engage with the exposomics community in the United States and around the world.
Notably, in May, the inaugural Exposome Moonshot Forum took place in Washington, D.C., which brought together diverse stakeholders from industry, academia, and government to chart the future of the Human Exposome. Over the course of three days, participants identified next steps and opportunities necessary to achieve the goals of the exposomics field and establish a global Human Exposome Initiative. The Exposome Moonshot Forum was hosted at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center by Fenna Sillé, Ph.D. and Thomas Hartung, M.D., Ph.D., and organized with input from an international Organizing Committee. Drs. Sillé and Hartung lead a collaborative hub of NEXUS, and all of the hubs of NEXUS were involved in providing assistance to the team at Hopkins.
Since May, the Global Exposome Forum has been established and aims to promote exposomics across the globe and engage the scientific and policy community. It will host their next event, the Global Exposome Summit, in collaboration with the International Human Exposome Network in Sitges (Barcelona, Spain) in April 2026. At the Exposome Moonshot Forum, NEXUS had the opportunity to connect with leaders in the field as a part of the NEXUS Conversations series, which highlighted the key takeaways from the meeting. The NEXUS Leadership team reflected on the meeting as a key moment for the field, which is also represented in a reflection video of the event.
In July, the seventh annual Exposome Bootcamp took place at Columbia University, bringing investigators from all career stages and around the world for two days of intensive seminars and hands-on analytical sessions. These sessions provided an overview of concepts, techniques, and data analysis methods used in exposome research. The Bootcamp is structured to foster meaningful connections, professional development, and the open exchange of key ideas among all attendees. The collaborative nature of the event enabled participants from diverse backgrounds and disciplines to expand their knowledge and skillset to better understand the exposome. The Bootcamp was led by a team of scientists in the field of exposomics, whose expertise spans a wide array of disciplines, and most of the instructors are formally affiliated with NEXUS. After the Bootcamp, NEXUS Leadership team reflected on the meeting where NEXUS had the opportunity to interview students about their biggest takeaway from the event, including from A Pulmonologist and Critical Care Physician’s Perspective.
In August, the 2025 ISES & ISEE Joint Annual Meeting convened global leaders in the field of exposure science and environmental health in Atlanta, Georgia. The conference featured seminars, workshops, poster sessions, and plenary lectures, which promoted the exchange of ideas and collaborative thinking. Although exposomics was not the central theme of the conference, both NEXUS and the exposome were well-represented. Key presentations highlighted the critical role of the exposome in understanding the relationships between environmental exposures and health outcomes, and, were hosted by NEXUS leadership including Krystal Pollitt, PhD, Yale University; Jeremy Koelmel, PhD, Yale University, Douglas Walker, PhD, Emory University; Carmen Marsit, PhD, Emory University; Dean Jones, PhD, Emory University and Rima Habre, ScD, University of Southern California, which is discussed in the NEXUS Blog article about the conference.
In 2026, Dr. Rima Habre and Dr. Krystal Pollitt will be co-chairing the ISES 2026 meeting in Vancouver, Canada, with the theme “The Exposome in Action: Collaborative Science for Healthier People and Stronger Communities.”
In September, the Santiago Exposome Symposium took place in Santiago, Chile, which framed an ambitious question: how do we integrate environmental exposures into Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (AD/ADRD) research—and do so in ways that work across countries, cohorts, time, and disciplines? The Santiago Exposome Symposium convened aging, neurology, and environmental health communities from Latin America, the U.S., and Europe to compare notes, share tools, and debate standards. Chirag Patel, PhD, Harvard University and Robert Wright, PhD, Mt Sinai Center for Exposomics and host of the event, reflected on the meeting for the NEXUS Blog.
In October, the Genomics Meets Exposomics: Advancing Gene by Environment Science meeting took place at the Mendel Museum in Brno, Czech Republic, and was a great success. The meeting was organized by Drs. Jana Klánová, Gary W. Miller, Robert Barouki, and Chirag Patel and aimed to develop a strategic plan for the advancement of gene-by-environment studies to better understand human disease.
The meeting featured presentations, panel discussions, and breakout sessions bringing together global leaders in genomics and exposomics. Topics discussed included cohort integration strategies, practical approaches for incorporating gene-by-environment (GxE) interactions into biomedical research, the technical foundations for understanding GxE relationships, and much more. A comprehensive meeting report was written by L. Michelle Bennett, PhD, LMBennett Consulting, LLC, and NEXUS MPIs Dr. Chirag Patel and Dr. Gary Miller reflected on the key takeaways from the meeting. At the meeting, NEXUS had the opportunity to interview key geneticists about their takeaways, as well as Dr. Ewan Birney, PhD, Interim Executive Director of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), for the NEXUS Podcast.
Other key milestones for NEXUS, includes the developments made by the NEXUS Chem Bio Analytical Science hubs, which is co-led by Krystal Pollitt, PhD, P.Eng., Yale University, and Thomas Metz, PhD, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and supported by team members Randolph Singh, PhD, Columbia University, and Jeremy Koelmel, PhD, Yale University. In June, the hub was spotlighted in the NEXUS newsletter, which highlighted the NEXUS Exposome Research Coordination Survey. Results of the survey were presented at the 2025 ISES & ISEE Joint Annual Meeting and the Metabolomics Association of North America (MANA) 2025 conference. The objective of the survey was to aggregate data across laboratories to facilitate knowledge exchange on methodologies and identify scalable, harmonized analytical and computational infrastructures for systematic exposome characterization. The survey to date has collected responses from over 165 respondents from 26 countries at 135 institutions, including academic (71%), government (9%), national (7%), and industry (7%) laboratories. This survey supports the NEXUS sub-goal of aggregating data across diverse laboratories. The initiative aims to facilitate knowledge exchange on the exposomic coverage of both current and emerging technologies. This effort also seeks to identify streamlined, scalable, and harmonized analytical and computational infrastructures necessary for the systematic characterization of the exposome.The survey consisted of questions pertaining to the type of omics-studies employed by laboratories (e.g., lipidomics, genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, xenobiotics analysis, etc.), types of sample preparation and extraction methods employed for each omics-field, instrumentation, and data-processing methodologies.
The NEXUS Geospatial Sciences Hub has established key institutional partnerships including participating in a workshop hosted by GECC in California. This meeting aimed to engage in deep discussions and prioritization of data domains and datasets for studies of the exposome and dementia across the lifecourse. The Gateway Exposome Coordinating Center ( GECC) is an important effort funded by the National Institute of Aging ( NIA), which aims to facilitate collaboration and consensus-building across disciplines and serve as a hub for collecting, organizing, and sharing exposome data for AD/ADRD research. NEXUS hopes to continue building upon this collaboration with the GECC, and to facilitate cross-disciplinary collaborations and partnerships for integrating geospatial measures of environmental exposures and broader societal factors into understanding the role of the exposome in aging, Alzheimer’s Disease and AD-Related Dementias.
Other partnerships include “ CAFÉ” Climate and Health Research Coordinating Center (RCC), which is exploring collaborations around curating, hosting, and disseminating geospatial datasets and best practices for modeling environmental exposures such as extreme heat and weather events, wildfire smoke, and more, and linking these to participants in health studies to examine impacts on health. These discussions are in joint partnership with the Connecting Health Outcomes Research and Data Systems ( CHORDS) project at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). The CHORDS Catalog provides accessible data and geospatial modeling and exposure linkage tools for environmental factors, exposures, and health outcomes. NEXUS MPI and Geospatial Sciences Hub co-Lead Dr. Habre and CAFÉ Data Management Function Co-Lead, Kevin Lane, PhD, Boston University School of Public Health, serve as Technical Expert Panel members for CHORDS, which has also helped catalyze deeper coordination efforts around environmental data standards and harmonization with the Environmental Health Language Collaborative ( EHLC), and scalable methods and datasets for characterizing the external environment with leading exposomics researchers.
In 2025, the NEXUS Data Sciences Hub has accelerated the development of scalable, reproducible, and policy-relevant computational methods for exposomics, with a particular emphasis on (i) robust exposome-wide association study (ExWAS) analytics, (ii) biological “linkage” resources connecting exposures to intermediate molecular phenotypes, and (iii) standards for evidence synthesis and data reporting needed to make exposomics interoperable across cohorts, laboratories, and countries. These have emerged in preprints or in papers in press. We anticipate 2026 will continue to report advances in the literature while developing requirements for compute resources that harness the advances in AI.
A major scientific milestone was the continued maturation of “mechanism-aware” ExWAS—moving beyond exposure–outcome associations toward identifying plausible molecular mediators. Building on this agenda, the Hub contributed to the Human Exposomic Architecture of the Proteome (HEAP), a framework and resource integrating genetic, exposomic, and plasma proteomic data in large-scale biobanks to map exposure–protein relationships and prioritize protein mediators that connect exposures to downstream disease risk (preprint: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.07.25327178v1 ; open-access version: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12083611/)).
The Hub also advanced the reproducibility and “analytic degrees-of-freedom” agenda in exposomics and adjacent domains, demonstrating how specification curve approaches can quantify the sensitivity of findings to reasonable modeling choices. In related work, the Hub helped develop and apply transparent frameworks for enumerating alternative analytic specifications and reporting the stability of conclusions—an approach aligned with the Hub’s broader goal of establishing exposomics as a field where robustness is routinely measured, not assumed (Nature Communications: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-64497-6).
In parallel, the Hub strengthened NEXUS’s capacity for geospatially resolved exposomics (see above), aligning with Hub-wide priorities to characterize the external environment at scale. A key contribution was work supporting spatiotemporal characterization of extreme heat and cold exposures to enable consistent exposure linkage in large observational cohorts, alongside ongoing efforts to connect extreme events to downstream health and economic consequences (Environmental Science & Technology: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.5c03658).
From a field-building and partnership standpoint, the Data Sciences Hub expanded collaborations intended to make exposomics “computable” and comparable across studies. This included harmonization efforts supporting cross-study meta-analysis of targeted exposomic resources (including HHEAR), development of new ExWAS educational materials and training resources, and coordination with international partners toward longer-term goals such as an ExWAS catalog and shared reporting expectations for ExWAS results. These international ties were reinforced through NEXUS convenings and media—most notably the Brno genomics-meets-exposomics meeting and the associated interview with EMBL/EBI leadership (Ewan Birney interview: https://youtu.be/uARzCwOn4Dc?si=dSpt8evDXzhT-8Oj). Look out for a paper coming out in January 2026 that describes the architecture of the exposome and phenome in the press ( https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.05.25329055v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.05.25329055v1)!
Finally, the Hub contributed to emerging guidance on what constitutes an “exposome experiment” and how to evaluate evidence strength in an era where observational ExWAS, omics profiling, and AI-driven synthesis are converging. This included policy-facing work on how new approach methodologies (NAMs) could be integrated into an exposomics evidence pipeline (NEJM AI: https://ai.nejm.org/doi/abs/10.1056/AIe2501301), alongside continued engagement with the broader scientific community through invited talks (e.g., Human Cell Atlas single-cell forum channel: https://www.youtube.com/@humancellatlas).
This year, the NEXUS Newsletter has grown substantially, highlighting partnerships including Electronic Health Records-Informed Lagrangian Method for Precision Public Health (EHRLICH) and Modeling Outcomes Using Surveillance Data and Scalable Artificial Intelligence for Cancer (MOSSAIC), and the SMARTER Project (Sensors and Metadata for Analytics and Research in Exposure Health) from the University of Utah.
The NEXUS Podcast has also featured key episodes, including “What is Exposomics?” “What is NEXUS?”. In addition, NEXUS MPI Chirag Patel, PhD, Harvard University, sat down with Ewan Birney, PhD, Interim Executive Director of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) to discuss the work being completed at EMBL and the intersection between genomics and exposomics. Overall, the objective of the NEXUS podcast is to bring together stakeholders of the field of exposomics to foster dialogue around key topics, further the understanding, and facilitate the advancement of the field of exposomics.
Additionally, NEXUS continues to develop exposomic workbenches and educational materials, which will begin rolling out on our online media platforms and website in 2026.
Looking into 2026, NEXUS aims to continue expanding outreach, specifically by scaling exposomic workbenches and tools, strengthening national and global partnerships, and supporting the broader exposomics community. NEXUS aims to continue social outreach, including further development of The NEXUS Podcast Series and the NEXUS monthly newsletter to engage the exposomics community and share new developments, publications, conferences in the field, and highlight key stakeholders in exposomics. In 2026, NEXUS is committed to maintaining and strengthening these established collaborations, and welcomes new partnerships in the United States and globally in the field of exposomics. If you would like to be spotlighted, or have your work, event, publication etc, featured on NEXUS social media or in our Newsletter please contact NEXUS.
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