Tuesday, January 13, 2026 - Wednesday, January 14, 2026
Article by: NEXUS Leadership
The goal of this workshop was to understand how exposome factors interact and how their combined effects across the lifespan affect neurological disorders and neurological resilience. To contextualize the meeting, the neural exposome is the integrated compilation of all physical, chemical, biological, and psychosocial influences that affect nervous system health and disease.
This meeting builds off of the NANDS Council Neural Exposome Top (NEXT) Priorities Working Group Report by The National Advisory Neurological Disorders and Stroke Council, which developed research priorities, and identified the most tractable and highest impact research opportunities across the three exposome categories (exogenous, endogenous, and social factors), including short and medium-term priorities. This group was chaired by Pamela J. Lein, PhD, of the University of California, Davis, and included NANDS Council Member Gina Poe, PhD, of the University of California, Los Angeles and Ekemini A. U. Riley, PhD, Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP).
Overall, this meeting provided a platform for idea exchange, collaboration, and networking and covered three key sessions, including “Vulnerable Life Stages, Critical Windows that Degrade Neurological Health, and Cumulative Effects of Exposure History,” “Model Systems and Technological Advancements to Study the Neural Exposome,” and “Mechanisms and Therapeutic Approaches to Promote Neurological Resilience Across the Lifespan.” Each session included engaging presentations from leaders in the field and concluded with an interactive panel discussion.
During his talk, Dr. Wright stressed the point that our health today is a function of our past exposome, not our exposome today, discussing “The Dilemma of Why” it is necessary to discuss the exposome over the life course and “The Dilemma of How” this can be done, highlighting the use of biobanks to go back to reconstruct the environment/ exposures through assays, and data mining, and AI tools.
Additionally, Dr. Wright discusses other barriers including the phenome, which are not static and evolve over time. Dr. Wright also referred to the blog, Exposome Perspectives, in which he provides examples of how the exposome can impact human health in an easy-to-read format.
Overall, his keynote stressed the importance of effective risk communication and learning from past exposures, which cannot be changed. He emphasized that key distinction between health span and precision health is that health span focuses on disease prevention while precision medicine is focused on treatment for disease, highlighting the critical role of exposomics in shaping long-term health trajectories.
Gary W. Miller, PhD, Adrienne Block Professor of Environmental Health Sciences, Columbia University, presented his work on environmental drivers of neurological diseases, including Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. He explained that new exposomics tools enable more comprehensive analysis of the complex environmental factors that contribute to neurodegeneration. He showed how untargeted mass spectrometry methods can identify pathways altered in the diseases and how this can lead to testable hypotheses for further study.
His recent work identified a role for lysophosphotidylcholines in regulating the transport of neuroprotective polyunsaturated fatty acids, which have been suggested to be an important dietary modulator of Alzheimer’s disease. In addition, he showed how his team linked air pollution components to specific molecules involved in redox homeostasis.
His keynote presentation also covered the development of the exposome concept, including the outcome of the Banbury Consortium, the Genomics Meets Exposomics meeting, along with the key goals and mission of NEXUS and the work being completed by the center hubs. Dr. Miller also discussed the goals of the Human Exposome Project and the role that ExWAS studies can play in advancing this work. This includes designing AI-ready, exposomics-focused, multi-omic cohorts and developing the necessary computing infrastructure to examine a wide range of human diseases.
NEXUS MPI Chirag Patel, PhD, Harvard University, also presented on “Learning the architecture of exposome -phenome association: what is an exposomic investigation?” In his talk, Dr. Patel outlines that the key element of an exposome investigation is to think beyond candidate exposures and think about the exposome as a whole. Exposome-wide association studies, just like its analog the genome-wide association study, plays a critical role in this. Scientists can look across thousands of factors — from air pollutants and diet to social stressors — to find unanticipated links to disease.
A key finding is that “polyexposome scores,” which aggregate multiple environmental factors, can be just as effective as genetic tests at predicting risks for conditions like Type 2 diabetes, lung disease, and even cognitive decline.
The ultimate goal of this work is to build an Exposome-Phenome Atlas (Nature Medicine, in press) that provides a transparent map between environmental exposures and their clinical manifestations. By integrating this data with molecular markers, such as blood proteins, the field is moving toward a causal future where we can better attribute health outcomes to specific factors.
This “inclusive, informative, and integrative” approach aims to refine precision medicine and improve public health policies by identifying modifiable risks long before they lead to serious illness, or even to optimize outcomes after diagnosis. Specifically, exposome-wide studies should strive to have the following characteristics:
- Inclusive: measure and taxonomize the breadth of geospatial and individual-level exposures
- Informative: develop studies to enable the creation of a maximally transparent map between exposures and clinical manifestations
- Integrative: relate exposures with phenotypes across spatial, psychosocial, and molecular domains
- Interactive: map the phenomenon of “co-exposure”, or aggregate exposure, and the connection between the “internal” and “external” exposome
- Iterative: develop global strategies for harmonization and replication
Day two began with opening remarks from Kyle Walsh, PhD, Director, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) along with key reflections from day one, including key challenges and gaps, recommendations and opportunities in training for exposomics research, non-medical factors that impede neural exposome research, and breaking silos and building bridges in neural exposome research. He also emphasized the importance of collaboration across NIH institutes, such as NINDS and NIEHS.
Key takeaways from the discussions included the need for a common language across the field, including data harmonization and the development of shared ontologies. Dr. Miller emphasized the importance of readily accessible tools and resources through shared platforms such as NEXUS and GECCC, as well as the development of freely available educational materials and online tutorials. These resources would help address skill and knowledge gaps in exposomics research, including best practices for sample collection, demographic data acquisition, laboratory analysis, and geospatial analysis.
Additional reflections from day one highlighted key challenges, gaps, and opportunities in neural exposome research, including the need for expanded training in exposomics, addressing non-medical factors that impede neural exposome research, and breaking down silos in neural exposome research to foster greater interdisciplinary collaboration. Additionally, the importance of addressing the trust gap between science and the public was also underscored, emphasizing community engagement as a critical mechanism for building trust and implementing more effective and sustainable interventions.
Overall, the meeting provided a valuable opportunity, connecting experts across disciplines and identifying shared priorities and opportunities for collaboration in neural exposome research. The discussions over this two-day workshop highlighted key gaps, needs, and opportunities to strengthen tools, training in order to better understand the role of the exposome in neurological health across the lifespan.
Co-Chair Dr. Lein, who also participated in the Banbury Conference, summed up the meeting as follows:
I am encouraged by how far the tools for conducting exposomic research have advanced since the Banbury Conference held in December 2023. While there is still a strong need to continue to advance exposomic tools, particularly with regard to database management, integration of diverse data streams, and statistical approaches for analyzing exposomic data, the tools currently available are being used to meaningfully apply exposomic approaches to the study of neurological disease and resiliency.Critical to advancing neural exposome research will be the anchoring of exposomic data to relevant phenotypes at multiple levels of biology ranging from cells to behavior to populations. It will also be important to develop a shared language that enables scientists with diverse expertise to interact in a productive manner and for scientists to establish the trust and engagement of the communities who stand to benefit from research on the neural exposome.
This meeting provided a great opportunity to connect with experts and align priorities for the future of neural exposome research.
Learn more about this meeting:
- Watch the recording of Day 1: https://videocast.nih.gov/watch=57196
- Watch the recording of Day 2: https://videocast.nih.gov/watch=57197