THE FUNDING APPLICATION DEADLINES HAVE PASSED

The Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program Office has announced its intent to publish two Notices of Funding Opportunity (NOFOs) inviting applications from entities/institutions in Institutional Development Award (IDeA)-eligible States to participate in the ECHO IDeA States Pediatric Clinical Trials Network (ISPCTN).

The ECHO Program is providing these notices to allow potential applicants sufficient time to develop meaningful collaborations and responsive projects.

The Program Office will not accept applications submitted before publication of the Notices of Funding Opportunity expected in January 2024.

The ECHO ISPCTN is the intervention component of the ECHO Program and supports its overall mission to enhance the health of children for generations to come.

The two notices of intent may be found here:

“Notice of Intent to Publish a Funding Opportunity Announcement for Clinical Sites for the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) IDeA States Pediatric Clinical Trials Network- 3 (UG1 Clinical Trial Required)” NOT-OD-24-045

“Notice of Intent to Publish a Funding Opportunity Announcement for Data Coordinating and Operations Center for the ECHO IDeA States Pediatric Clinical Trials Network – 3 (U24 Clinical Trial Optional Infrastructure)” NOT-OD-24-046

Please direct all inquiries to:

Tonse N.K. Raju, MD
Program Officer
Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO)
Office of the Director, National Institutes of Health
Three White Flint North, Room 03D17
11601 Landsdown Street
North Bethesda, MD 20852
Mobile: 202-302-3984
ECHO Phone: 301-435-5236
tonse.raju@nih.gov

The Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program in the Office of the Director of the National Institutes of Health has made 49 awards totaling over $157 million for the first year of the second seven-year cycle of the ECHO Cohort Consortium.

Forty-five ECHO Cohort Study Sites will recruit and continue to follow participants across the country. A Coordinating Center, Data Analysis Center, Laboratory Core, and Measurement Core will help facilitate the science. Together, as the ECHO Cohort Consortium, they will conduct observational research to further investigate the roles of a broad range of early exposures, including during the preconception period, on five key child health outcomes among diverse populations.

“What makes ECHO special is our commitment to informing programs, policies, and practices that enhance the health of children for generations to come,” said Matthew W. Gillman, MD, SM, Director of the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program. “We look forward to another seven years of the ECHO Cohort, to find meaningful answers to big questions in child health that only large and diverse studies like ours are able to answer.”

ECHO funded these awards after a competitive peer review process. View a list of each prime awardee.

Extending and Expanding the ECHO Cohort

From September 2023 through May 2030, the ECHO Cohort Consortium will follow more than 30,000 current ECHO Cohort child and adolescent participants and their families, while adding more than 30,000 new pregnant participants and their offspring. In addition, researchers will follow at least 10,000 women and, when available, their partners, to examine how preconception exposures may influence child health outcomes. The enhanced ECHO Cohort will include about 60,000 total children and adolescents by 2030.

Following this large and diverse population will enhance ECHO’s ability to answer solution-oriented questions about the effects of a broad range of early environmental exposures, from society to biology, on child health and development. Scientific opportunities in the second cycle are nearly limitless and may include effects of novel chemicals, addressing health equity, impact of media use, assessing natural experiments, influences of preconception exposures, and consequences of social determinants of health, among others.

Building on Seven Years of Success

Since 2016, more than 1200 ECHO Cohort researchers at more than 180 institutions have collaborated to weave data from 69 pre-existing longitudinal maternal-child health studies into a single national resource. Data from more than 107,000 child and parent participants in the ECHO Cohort have powered more than 1200 peer-reviewed articles across five pediatric areas of high public health impact: pre-, peri- and postnatal health; upper and lower airways; obesity; neurodevelopment; and positive health. The geographic, socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic diversity of participants amplifies the sheer size of the ECHO Cohort to present unique opportunities to promote long-lasting health by informing programs, policies, and practices.

THE FUNDING APPLICATION DEADLINES HAVE PASSED

Funding Opportunities

The Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program Office has released the following Notices of Funding Opportunities (NOFOs):

Maximizing the Scientific Value of Data Generated by the Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program: Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) Individual Postdoctoral Fellowship (F32)

Maximizing the Scientific Value of Data Generated by the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program: Dissertation Grant (R36)

ECHO is an extramurally funded program maintained within the Office of the Director at the NIH, with the mission to enhance the health of children for generations to come.

The goal of the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) Individual Postdoctoral Fellowship (F32) is to provide opportunities for postdoctoral fellows to study child health outcomes through the secondary analyses of ECHO’s large longitudinal data sets within the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Development Data and Specimen Hub (DASH) repository.

The goal of the Dissertation Grant (R36) is to support doctoral candidates studying applicable areas of child health for the completion of their doctoral dissertation research project. This funding opportunity will provide students working on dissertations the opportunity to access the ECHO data within the DASH repository.

ECHO’s DASH data set integrates deidentified longitudinal data from more than 41,000 participants across the U.S. and focuses on child health outcomes including pre-, peri- and postnatal outcomes; upper and lower airway health; obesity; neurodevelopment; and positive health.

Available deidentified data includes:

• Demographic information including race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, and education
• Early development data including growth, milestones, physical activity, and sleep
• Environmental exposure data including physical, chemical, psychosocial, and natural and built environments
• Pregnancy and birth information including maternal diet and physical activity, maternal smoking during pregnancy, weight gain, and delivery outcomes
• Data related to public health crises including surveys on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic

NIH encourages applications from candidates from diverse backgrounds, including those from underrepresented groups as described in the Notice of NIH’s Interest in Diversity (NOT-OD-20-031).

If you have questions, please reach out to Clay Mash: clay.mash@nih.gov.

REGISTRATION FOR THIS EVENT HAS CLOSED

The NIH Obesity Research Task Force will host a virtual symposium on June 6, 2023, featuring advances in childhood obesity research by the NIH Environmental influence on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program.

This seminar will cover several determinants of childhood obesity that take advantage of ECHO’s size and diversity, including natural experiments, community level factors, social and chemical stressors, and health behaviors.

Please visit the seminar webpage for more details, including registration information and an agenda.

On March 16–17, 2023, ECHO hosted a virtual workshop on the Return of Individual Research Results to Participants to identify principles and best practices to ethically and feasibly return individual research results to participants in large-sample studies that include pregnant women and children. Over 500 registrants heard 16 expert speakers and discussants present their work on the history and principles of returning individual results, the value of results to participants, the selection of which results to return, and how to return individual results.

Workshop themes included:

• What are the principles and best practices for returning results to pregnant people and children that differ from those of other participants?
• How can the workshop facilitate equity in return of individual results?
• Most research on returning results focuses on genetics results; how can we broaden inclusion to additional data like other bioassays, physical measures, and self-reports?

Additional information about the speakers, presentations, and workshop agenda is available.

Recordings of the workshop sessions can be viewed using the following links:

• NIH ECHO Return of Individual Research Results to Participants Workshop — Day 1
• NIH ECHO Return of Individual Research Results to Participants Workshop — Day 2

The ECHO Program is excited to announce that de-identified new and extant ECHO data is now available through the Data and Specimen Hub (DASH). DASH is a centralized resource established by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) that allows researchers to share and access de-identified data from studies via a controlled-access mechanism.

The ECHO-wide Cohort combines 69 cohorts across the U.S. and allows researchers to access information from a large and diverse population of children followed from the prenatal period through adolescence. This first public-use version of ECHO-wide Cohort data covers information collected on 41,299 participants and provides a valuable resource for the scientific community. This momentous step fulfills both a key strategic goal of the ECHO Program and an obligation to U.S. taxpayers for their investment in our research.

Researchers can now request access to these data by creating a DASH account and submitting a Data Request Form. The NICHD DASH Data Access Committee will review the request and provide a response in approximately two to three weeks. Once granted access, researchers will be able to use the data for three years. See the DASH Tutorial for more detailed information on the process.

THE FUNDING APPLICATION DEADLINES HAVE PASSED

Funding Opportunity Announcements

The Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program Office has released the following Funding Opportunity Announcements (FOAs):

FOA	Contact
ECHO Pregnancy and Pediatric Cohort Study Sites (Limited Competition)	S. Sonia Arteaga
ECHO Pediatric Cohort Study Sites (Limited Competition)	S. Sonia Arteaga
ECHO Pregnancy Cohort Study Sites Change in Application Due Date	S. Sonia Arteaga
ECHO Coordinating Center	Susan Laessig
ECHO Data Analysis Center	Christina Park
ECHO Measurement Core	Christina Park
ECHO Laboratory Core	Manjit Hanspal

These FOAs will invite applications to extend and expand the capacity of the ECHO Cohort to further investigate the roles of a broad range of early exposures from society to biology, including the preconception period, across ECHO’s five key child health outcome areas—pre-, peri- and postnatal, upper and lower airways, obesity, neurodevelopment, and positive health—among diverse populations.

Pre-Recorded Informational Webinars

NOTE: A speakerphone icon on webinar slides indicates that there is a webinar video with audio that accompanies the file.

ECHO Pregnancy and Pediatric Cohort Study Sites (Limited Competition) Pre-Application Webinar RFA OD-22-018

• Webinar video
• Webinar slides

ECHO Pediatric Cohort Study Sites (Limited Competition) Pre-Application Webinar RFA-OD-22-019

• Webinar video
• Webinar slides

ECHO Pregnancy Cohort Sites Pre-Application Webinar RFA-OD-22-017

While the original due date is still reflected in this pre-recorded webinars, the ECHO Program Office has extended the application due date for RFA-OD-22-017 (ECHO Pregnancy Cohort Study Sites) to November 29, 2022. See NOT-OD-23-007 for more detail.

• Webinar video
• Webinar slides

ECHO Coordinating Center Pre-Application Webinar RFA-OD-22-021

• Webinar video
• Webinar slides

ECHO Data Analysis Center Pre-Application Webinar RFA-OD-22-022

• Webinar video
• Webinar slides

ECHO Measurement Core Pre-Application Webinar RFA-OD-22-020

• Webinar video
• Webinar slides

ECHO Laboratory Core Pre-Application Webinar RFA-OD-22-016

• Webinar video
• Webinar slides

ECHO Overview Pre-Application Webinar

• Webinar video
• Webinar slides

Frequently Asked Questions

• ECHO Cohort Study Sites, RFA-OD-22-017, RFA-OD-22-018, RFA-OD-22-019
• ECHO Coordinating Center, RFA-OD-22-021
• ECHO Data Analysis Center, RFA-OD-22-022
• ECHO Measurement Core, RFA-OD-22-020
• ECHO Laboratory Core, RFA-OD-22-016

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program is pleased to celebrate Children’s Environmental Health Day on October 14, 2021.

Established by the Children’s Environmental Health Network, Children’s Environmental Health (CEH) Day is focused on action and equity. The goal of CEH Day is to collectively increase the visibility of children’s environmental health issues while empowering individuals and organizations to take action on behalf of children nationwide. Please visit the ECHO Coordinating Center Website to view a curated collection of lay summaries on ECHO research relevant to CEH Day.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program hosted a free 2-day Preconceptional Orgins of Child Health Outcomes Webinar Thursday June 17, 2021 10:00AM – 4:15PM (EDT) and Friday June 18, 2021 10:00AM – 3:00PM (EDT).

Workshop Purpose

1. To assess the state of the science, research gaps, and opportunities related to how preconception exposures may influence child health outcomes.
2. To discuss how to overcome operational challenges in conducting preconception cohort studies.

The Workshop was composed of five themes. Each theme provides an opportunity for speakers and discussants to address theme-specific issues and for the audience to ask questions:

Thursday June 17, 2021

• Theme 1: Lifestyle Factors/Obesity
• Theme 2: Recruitment/Study Design
• Theme 3: Fathers

Friday, June 18, 2021

• Theme 4: Physical and Chemical Exposures
• Theme 5: Psychosocial and Societal Influences

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program recently released a Request for Information (RFI) to seek input from the scientific community and the general public about enhancing ECHO science.

Through this RFI, the NIH asked for comments on any or all of but not limited to, the following topics:

I. General Topics

• Approaches to promote scientific value while reducing burden on participants and staff in large consortia of parent-child cohort studies that involve primary data collection
• Nimbleness to address public health emergencies in large collaborative consortia of longitudinal studies
• Engagement strategies to enhance recruitment and retention of diverse study populations
• Promotion of diversity of the scientific workforce related to child health

II. Preconceptional Origins of Child Health Outcomes:

• Identifying solution-oriented (“so what”) scientific questions about preconceptional origins of child health outcomes, based on knowledge from pre-clinical, clinical work, and population research
• Strategies for recruiting participants preconceptionally, and retaining through pregnancy into childhood
• Measures and biospecimens from prospective mothers and fathers that cohorts should collect prior to or in early pregnancy
• Ethical considerations regarding study participation of biological and non-biological fathers

The ECHO Program Office held a webinar on May 6, 2021 to discuss the RFI. If you were unable to attend the webinar or would like to view the recording, we are pleased to provide it here:

The ECHO Program Office released a Request for information (RFI) on April 22, 2021 titled “Request for information on enhancing the science for the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes program” under notice number NOT-OD-21-108 and extended under notice number NOT-OD-21-129. The purpose of the RFI was to gather input from stakeholders throughout the extramural scientific community and general public regarding the enhancement of ECHO science. The RFI closed on June 08, 2021 after being open for 47 days. ECHO received a total of 23 comments. The linked pdf below summarizes key information provided from the responses about how ECHO could enhance its science. Common themes among the RFI responses included the importance of the ECHO program; reducing burden on ECHO participants and staff; potential engagement strategies for recruiting and retaining diverse study populations; and whether to expand ECHO’s scientific focus to include the preconception period.

Compilation of RFI Responses

Review the RFI Response Summary