About the ECHO Coordinating Center

The ECHO Coordinating Center is located at the Duke Clinical Research Institute in Durham, NC. It is the central site that organizes and manages activities to ensure all ECHO Components are working together. The Coordinating Center:

• Keeps track of and communicates program news, requirements, and progress.
• Supports the infrastructure of ECHO through managing committees, groups, and task forces within the program.
• Develops processes and procedures that help govern the program.
• Oversees an Opportunities and Infrastructure Fund designed to support pilot projects, encourage junior researchers, and introduce new tools and technologies for ECHO.

Principal Investigators: Brian Smith (Duke Clinical Research Institute); Linda Adair (UNC Gillings School of Public Health)

About the Data Analysis Center

The Data Analysis Center (DAC) is located at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD and RTI International in Raleigh, NC. The DAC brings together data from the ECHO Cohort and puts it in a usable format that allows us to learn more about child health. The DAC:

• Offers expertise in designing, reviewing, and understanding ECHO studies using principles of science to address how environmental exposures, social situations, and genetics can affect child health.
• Brings together, manages, and approves the quality of the data across the ECHO cohort, and develops and uses new ways to best understand the data.
• Provides secure systems for transferring, editing, combining, storing, and backing up data.
• Creates processes to ensure data is collected the same way across ECHO cohort studies, working with researchers and staff from the other ECHO components.
• Promotes the use of quality-assured ECHO data in scientific studies of child health, working with the scientific community to provide an interactive system to visualize and understand data and track the progress of approved projects.

Principal Investigators: Lisa Jacobson (Johns Hopkins University); Diane Catellier (RTI International)

About the Laboratory Core

The Laboratory Core provides analysis of biological samples including a rigorous assessment of a range of environmental exposures, xenobiotics, physiological measurements, metabolomics, nutrients, inflammatory biomarkers, and other biological indicators of environmental exposure.

Additionally, they use statistical tools and data science approaches to manage and analyze newly generated datasets pertaining to chemical exposure analysis of biological samples in a cohesive and integrated manner.

Principal Investigators: Suman Das, Jane Freedman, Simon Mallal, John McLean, Ravi Shah

About the Measurement Core

The Measurement Core is located at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. Researchers at the Measurement Core capture the experiences of children and their families who are taking part in ECHO. The Measurement Core is responsible for keeping and providing person-reported outcome (PRO) information for researchers, helping researchers use PRO assessments in their study designs, and coordinating plans for updating, approving and using PRO information in studies. The Measurement Core:

• Provides adult and pediatric exposure and health assessments that include self-reports and reports on behalf of someone else. These may be observation measures of child functioning within multiple situations, or performance measures (i.e. performing a task) of multiple pieces of child functioning.
• Creates and approves new measures (and modifies existing measures as needed).
• Advises on understanding data using PRO tools, including understanding psychological measures to evaluate performance of new and existing measures in ECHO. Provides direction and expertise on PRO measures to explore the relationship between environmental exposures and child health.

Principal Investigators: Richard Gershon (Northwestern University); Courtney Blackwell (Northwestern University)