I take great pleasure in sharing that the ECHO Cohort Consortium entered a new cycle at the beginning of September, which will allow the ECHO Program to extend and expand the ECHO Cohort to fulfill its mission of enhancing child health for generations to come. We look forward to continuing the high-impact research coming out of ECHO over the next seven years.

National Childhood Obesity Awareness Month this month reminds us that ECHO investigators conduct important research on how nutrition influences child health across all five ECHO outcome areas, including obesity. You can learn more in this month’s Research Spotlight story about a recent ECHO Cohort study that found limiting access to sugary drinks in the home can reduce child consumption by up to 87%, offering a possible approach to reduce childhood obesity.

Finally, I want to remind you that we have two current funding opportunities. These Notices of Funding Opportunities (NOFOs)  for postdoctoral fellows and doctoral candidates, respectively, both provide a chance to study child health outcomes by performing analysis of the ECHO Cohort’s large longitudinal data set on the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD) Data and Specimen Hub (DASH) The knowledge and experience generated by these two opportunities will help ECHO pursue its goal of providing a national resource.