CONNECT - Cohort and environmental data integration for epidemiological innovation

While the world faces an escalating climate crisis, our knowledge of the health risks of environmental stressors and climate change remains limited. CONNECT will bridge recent advances in geospatial modelling and health data infrastructure to revolutionise the research context in this field. The project, led by the EHM-Lab at LSHTM, is built on a well-structured research programme. First, novel GIS and machine-learning techniques will be applied to reconstruct hyper-resolution maps of environmental and climatic stressors across the UK. The team will then develop an innovative linkage scheme as well as cutting-edge statistical and computational techniques to integrate and analyse these data within the major large-scale UK cohort platforms. Various applications of the framework will be demonstrated in real-data case studies. Finally, methodologies, data, and training material will be released in open-access repositories and tutorials. This work will connect detailed individual-level measures of environmental exposures and physical environment with socio-economic indicators, medications and therapies, health events/conditions, and metabolic/genomic profiles in cohorts of millions of patients/participants. These resources will unlock unparalleled opportunities to address knowledge gaps, allowing investigations of complex mechanisms linking environment, climate, and health, and eventually informing public health and climate policies, reshaping this research field for decades to come.