On May 28th, the Global Exposome Forum (GEF) hosted a virtual town hall featuring the newly formed GEF India Regional Chapter centered on the theme “ Understanding Exposomics for Lifecourse Health and Ageing: An Indian perspective for a Viksit Bharat.” The event brought together more than 120 participants from around the world, including global leaders in exposomics alongside high-level scientists, clinical researchers, and policy makers from India to discuss the role of exposomics as a determinant of human health towards building a healthy and developed India.
In recent years several large population-scale environmental health-focused cohort studies have been initiated in India ,with thousands of participants enrolled across multiple states and all stages of the life course. These studies include multiple fields of information on environmental, metabolic, socio-behavioral and epigenetic determinants of human health and thus readily lend themselves to exposomics research. With strategic data harmonization and sharing, these studies can offer nuanced insights for regional and global human exposomics initiatives.
With a view to catalyse momentum on exposomics in India, the Virtual Town Hall was organized jointly by: Kalpana Balakrishnan, Distinguished Professor and Director of WHO Collaborating Center, Sri Ramachandra Institute of Higher Education and Research, Chennai; Poornima Prabhakaran, Professor and Director of Centre for Health Analytics Research and Trends , Trivedi School of Biosciences at Ashoka University and Deputy Director and Head-Environmental Health, Centre for Chronic Disease Control; Areejit Samal, The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai; Fenna Sillé, Global Exposome Forum Committee Member and Deputy Director of the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT) at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; Camila Sgrignoli Januario, Global Exposome Forum Committee Member and Senior Program Manager at the CAAT.
Learn more about the event and organizing committee.
The Town Hall began with a presentation by NEXUS MPI Gary Miller, Columbia University who provided an overview of the field of exposomics and an update on recent technological advances that are moving the field forward. Next, Fenna Sillé presented an overview of the Global Exposome Forum. These introductions were followed by talks by senior scientific voices from India including Prof. Anurag Agrawal, Ashoka University who discussed opportunities in India for big data and human health, Ashoka University and Prof. Soumya Swaminathan, MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) who spoke about the challenges and opportunities for exposomics work in India. Subsequently, Kalpana Balakrishnan and Poornima Prabhakaran summarized the multiple exposomics initiatives currently underway in India.
The second half of the event was an engaging panel discussion on the “Challenges and Opportunities for Exposomics Research in India.” The panel was moderated by Fenna Sillé and Areejit Samal, and featured panelists: Shinjini Bhatnagar, Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR); Rima Habre, NEXUS and University of Southern California; Vinay Nandicoori, CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CSIR-CCMB); Chirag Patel, NEXUS and Harvard University; Dorairaj Prabhakaran, Centre for Chronic Disease Control (CCDC). The guiding theme of this panel was the challenges and opportunities for exposomics research.
Panelists, NEXUS MPI and Co-lead of the Geospatial Sciences Hub Rima Habre shared her experience in large collaborative efforts from her work in NEXUS and CLIMAte-related Exposures, Adaptation and Health (CLIMA), and in the ECHO Children’s Health Study, highlighting key lessons learned from these initiatives for ensuring long-term success of large, collaborative exposomics infrastructure and research efforts in India. She noted the importance of local leadership, investment in people and training, and the need for shared language and governance models to ensure long-term success beyond the initial building stages. She also highlighted the many opportunities for collaboration with NEXUS and the global exposome community to facilitate success and share knowledge.
NEXUS MPI Chirag Patel also discussed data integration challenges when working across diverse sources to understand the exposome and its effect on human health. He also discussed key challenges when sharing data across research groups, especially, across different countries that are not specific to India. The technical challenges of multi-cohort exposome research are substantial: exposome assay platforms differ across labs, detection limits vary, exposure windows rarely align with outcome ascertainment periods, and phenotype definitions diverge across health systems. Cross-country data sharing exacerbates these problems further, with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), India’s Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, and US HIPAA creating an incompatible governance regime, but can be overcome through savvy use of technology and federated analyses.
In fact, India has one of the world’s largest talent pools in software engineering, statistics, and machine learning — with a growing computational biology community (Indian Institute of Science (IISc), the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc), the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), and the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). Chirag also emphasized that it is time not to think of one singular exposome, but the system of exposures that comprise the exposome. This is exemplified by a recent perspective on exposomics research, where Chirag and NEXUS investigators laid out a vision particularly apt for the Indian subcontinent in being comprehensive in their search for exposures.
Let us not forget that the exposome diversity within India alone, urban/rural gradients, organophosphate pesticide burden, indoor biomass combustion, extreme heat, arsenic in groundwater, ambient PM2.5 from crop burning makes it an imperative to study the natural living laboratory for exposome research.
Dr. Prabhakaran, Dr. Shinjini Bhatnagar and Dr. Vinay NandiCoori shared their extensive previous experience in running large-scale cohorts and generating policy level evidence and reiterated the value of integrative and holistic approaches to address the complex and diverse exposure configurations in India.
Following the panel discussion, K. VijayRaghavan, Former Principal Scientific Advisor to Government of India, offered an insightful reflection on the history of new and innovative paradigms to address health and disease that have been developed in India. He urged the consortium to look at bold and ambitious frameworks that would bring together the entire eco-system to examine priorities for human health and proposed several valuable recommendations for moving forward.
The town hall concluded with the formal announcement of the establishment of the India Chapter of the Global Exposome Forum.
Overall, NEXUS was happy to be a part of this event, which builds on years of partnerships and collaborations with our colleagues in India, and marks the start of a new chapter for exposomics as a field and as a cornerstone for public health. Thank you to the organizing committee for such a successful and engaging event!
NEXUS Collaborations Throughout India
NEXUS has ongoing collaborations with colleagues across India to advance exposomics research.
NEXUS MPI Rima Habre has worked in close collaboration with leaders in the exposomics community in India including Kalpana Balakrishnan and Poornima Prabhakaran. At the Global Exposome Summit held in April 2026 Rima Habre had the opportunity to sit down with Poornima Prabhakaran to discuss her career and journey as a physician, epidemiologist, and public health leader, and her vision for the future of exposomics in India, given her long history of leadership in establishing cohort studies and biorepositories and training generations of scientists and future leaders across health sectors in India.
Last year, Dr. Habre attended the ICMR NIOH organized Indo-US Conference on Climate Change Impacts on Occupational and Environmental Health ( CliCON OEH2025) in Ahmedabad, India where she delivered her plenary talk. Dr. Habre discussed geospatial and measurement approaches to assessing extreme weather related exposures and vulnerability factors, especially the use of geospatial data, remote sensing data, machine learning models, and personal monitoring. She presented a vision for increased transdisciplinary science education, research training, and global collaboration through NEXUS given the urgency and multifaceted nature of environmental chemicals and hazards experienced by populations worldwide, and using the recent Los Angeles wildfires as an example. Read the full article.
In addition, Rima Habre was featured in the Health World by the India Economic Times alongside Kalpana Balakrishnan in the article “ Health isn’t shaped by genes alone - it’s in the air and all around us” after the Exposome Moonshot Forum in April 2025.
NEXUS MPI Chirag Patel is currently working in close collaboration with Areejit Samal, IMSc Chennai, to develop computational biology tools and databases to dissect the biology behind complex exposure specific to the subcontinent. Additionally, his post-doctoral associate, Dr. Raghav Tandon, will take up a faculty position at the prestigious IIT Mumbai Koita Digital Health department, where his focus will be to continue the landmark work he has done to elucidate the role of extreme heat and cold in aging and the role of occupation as a translational lever to mitigate system of exposures that burden the population.
NEXUS MPI Gary Miller virtually attended the Centre for Chronic Disease Control (CCDC) 25th Anniversary Celebration in New Delhi, where Poornima Prabhakaran led a session about exposomics which Gary Miller, attended remotely. Dr. Miller commented on the tools that NEXUS is developing to support the field of exposomics and the opportunities for collaboration between NEXUS and investigators in India.
NEXUS looks forward to continuing to strengthen collaborations with partners across India to advance exposomics research in the years ahead.