Interdepartmental Program
Jonathan and Karin Fielding School of Public Health
56-070 Center for Health Sciences
Box 951772
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1772
Molecular Toxicology
310-206-1619
E-mail contact
Faculty from 19 departments from six schools at UCLA, including chemistry and biochemistry, environmental health sciences, epidemiology, medicine, molecular and medical pharmacology, and pathology and laboratory medicine, have joined forces to create an interdisciplinary PhD program in Molecular Toxicology that is administered through the Fielding School of Public Health.
Specialties within the program include, but are not limited to, neurotoxicology, developmental toxicology, genetic toxicology, and carcinogenesis. There is a particular emphasis on mechanisms of toxicity, since it is now widely accepted that understanding mechanisms will provide the means for accurately determining risk.
New chemicals have been the basis for most of the technological developments during the past century, and there is no question that society has reaped enormous benefits from the creation and growth of the chemical industry. However, major health and environmental problems have also been the legacy of the synthesis of new chemical species. The discipline of toxicology, which seeks to characterize and elucidate the mechanisms of the problems related to exposure of chemical agents, has also developed from a purely descriptive to a mechanistic science whose objective is to understand the basis of toxin action, predict the toxicity of new chemical entities, and protect organisms from them. Toxicology has used the basic disciplines of chemistry, biochemistry, and cell biology to advance understanding of toxicological phenomena, and the growth of the sophistication of toxicology has paralleled the increase in knowledge derived from the basic chemical and biological sciences.
