Paolo Vineis

Paolo Vineis (born 10 October 1951, in Alba) is an Italian professor of Environmental Epidemiology at Imperial College London. His main work is on the impact of environmental changes (including air pollution and climate change) on human health and molecules. This includes the use of omics technologies in epidemiological studies, that is the quantitative measurement of global sets of molecules in biological samples using high-throughput techniques, in combination with advanced biostatistics and bioinformatics tools. In particular, the study of epigenomic changes in DNA is currently one of the most promising fields for the identification of long-term environmental fingerprints. The development of the concept of exposome (with Chris Wild, Director of the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer, and Stephen Rappaport and Martyn Smith of University of California, Berkeley's School of Public Health), led to Professor Vineis being awarded a grant from the European Commission (Seventh Framework Programme) in 2012 on exposome research (EXPOsOMICS). The exposome refers to the totality of internal and external exposures which interact at a cellular and systems level to generate a metabolic/ molecular signature which can be used to gain new understanding of the transition from health to disease. Paolo Vineis is also the coordinator of the Horizon 2020 LIFEPATH project, whose aim is to understand the determinants of diverging ageing pathways among individuals belonging to different socio-economic groups. This is achieved by integrating social science approaches with biology, using omics measurements (particularly epigenomics). Paolo Vineis is also the director of the Unit of Molecular and Genetic Epidemiology, Italian Institute of Genomic Medicine (IIGM), Turin, Italy. Professor Vineis has published many research articles on environmental risks and has written several books on health, causality and the ethics of health care.