Envirome Institute Researchers Secure More Than $16 Million in New Funding

This year's grants range from funding for a new Center to study nutrition and metabolism to wastewater surveillance in rural Kentucky, but they all seek to provide answers to the same question: how does our environment shape our health?

FY26 was a banner year for the Christina Lee Brown Envirome Institute. Over the 2026 fiscal year, which includes the twelve months ended June 30, researchers across the Institute secured more than $16 million in new research funding, money that will support scientific research into cardiovascular health and disease; exercise and metabolism; e-cigarettes; and the health impact of urban greening as well as new scientific instrumentation and wastewater surveillance to help detect and manage disease outbreaks.

The new awards come from funding organizations such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Commonwealth of Kentucky, Louisville Metro, the American Heart Association, the Humana Foundation, and the Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine, among others, a diversity of supporters that reflects the variety of topics the Institute is investigating and the value that funding partners place on the expertise of Envirome Institute researchers.

A new Center and a continued focus on cardiovascular research 

The year's largest grant provides funding for a new Nutrition and Metabolic Health Center, which is the recipient of a five-year CoBRE grant from The National Institute of General Medical Sciences. The Center co-directors, Matthew Cave and Bradford Hill, will lead a team that investigates how foods affect health, how the body processes food and how environmental exposures affect metabolism. In addition, the Center will train and elevate the next generation of scientists, giving early career investigators the mentorship and infrastructure to become independently funded scientists. Two additional NIH grants focus on cardiovascular health. Alex Carll was awarded a $3.9 million R01 NIH/National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) grant to investigate the cooling agents now common in flavored e-cigarettes, and what inhaling them does to the heart and lungs. Marcin Wysoczynski, with roughly $3.6 million R01 also from NIH/NHLBI, is studying the immune system's response in the hours after a heart attack and why that response sometimes heals the heart and sometimes quietly weakens it.

In keeping with the Envirome Institute’s focus on optimizing health, our researchers will be conducting new research on human performance. Aruni Bhatnagar is leading a $2.1 million military study asking a deceptively simple question: why do two people doing the same workout get such different results? By following 100 young adults through 12 weeks of training and tracking everything from bloodwork to cognition and mental health, the team hopes to make

scientific discoveries that will eventually enable exercise to be tailored to a person's biology – “precision exercise” for optimal performance, recovery and resilience.

Science that shows up when the community needs it

Some of this year's funding supports public health surveillance that is already underway as well as bolstering environmental response capacity. Ted Smith's team secured a $1.3 million renewal and expansion of Kentucky's statewide wastewater surveillance program, making the Envirome Institute’s Center for Healthy Air, Water and Soil the only team using wastewater to track disease across the entire Commonwealth, now with genomic sequencing and emergency rural monitoring for emerging threats like measles. Two more awards will enable the same group to mobilize quickly as needs arise. Funding from the Louisville Metro Government renews support for rapid-response research capacity for emerging infectious-diseases such as Ebola, measles, West Nile virus and other emerging public-health threats. A time-sensitive NIH study of the Westlake Vinyls industrial fire in Calvert City demonstrates the Institute’s ability to rapidly mobilize environmental monitoring, exposure science and public-health expertise following a real-world environmental emergency.

Green space, state-of-the-art instruments and the next generation of scientists 

Ray Yeager and Rachel Keith each earned pilot grants to test how greener surroundings affect the body, from cardiovascular health to measurable changes in the body’s stress response after time spent in an urban microforest. A $640,000 NIH instrumentation award to Jason Hellmann brings a powerful new mass spectrometer to the Center for Cardiometabolic Science’s Metabolic Profiling Core, providing state-of-the-art mass spectrometry services for labs across the university. An award to Steven P. Jones (American Heart Association) will advance the scientific understanding of a common form of heart failure associated with diabetes and obesity for which effective treatment options remain limited. And an award to predoctoral fellow Caitlin Wilkerson (NIH) will support an examination of the immune cells that play important roles in inflammation, healing and cardiovascular health.

The through-line: health and the environment go hand in hand

Add it all up and a single idea runs through the year: the environments and conditions we live in shape our health in ways worth studying. From nutrition and health to identifying emerging health threats via wastewater surveillance, this year's funding puts that idea into action and demonstrates how the Envirome Institute can have a direct impact on the health of our community while creating new knowledge about how the environment impacts health.