Every one of us constantly experiences internal and external exposures throughout our lifetime. Some of them we can control and are a matter of choice - such as our diet, or if we engage in smoking and physical activity. Others are hardly in our hands, such as the environment we live in, our exposure to pollution, noise and temperature. Other factors are inheritated, such as the genetic make-up. All these factors constitute the “exposome”, and they influence our health – each on their own and jointly, through complex interactions and dependencies.

In our working group, we study these effects of internal and external exposures on phenotypes of human health and disease. We disentangle their dependencies, characterize shared pathways and make their impact on health visible. Our aim is to better understand how the exposome affects disease development for every one of us, so we can develop individual risk estimation and prevent disease progression.