• Press Release

Mount Sinai Receives $100,000 from The Honest Company for Inaugural Children’s Environmental Health Innovation Grant

Will support research about how environment influences health throughout life

  • New York, NY
  • (March 21, 2018)

The Honest Company has awarded The Institute for Exposomics Research at Mount Sinai $100,000 to fund two postdoctoral fellows conducting research in children’s environmental health. Click here to watch a video about the grant.

The grant recipients are Erik de Water, PhD, and Jeanette Stingone, PhD. Each fellow will receive $50,000 to fund their research programs. Dr. de Water will study the effects of maternal metal exposure on their children's developing brains. Dr. Stingone will study the correlation between prenatal and early life exposures to environmental chemicals and early puberty, a risk factor for adult adverse health outcomes including breast cancer and cardiovascular disease.

In 2014, Mount Sinai Health System partnered with The Honest Company to open The Honest Company Ultra Clean Room. Part of the Senator Frank R. Lautenberg Environmental Health Sciences Laboratory, the state-of-the-art facility measures the impact of chemicals in the environment on children’s health. The Honest Company Ultra Clean Room is the “gold standard” in analytical chemistry laboratories. It is equipped with technologies that significantly reduce the risk of sample contamination and allow researchers to measure extremely low levels of exposures—even levels as small as parts per trillion.

“There has been a big push to understand the genetic contributions of disease, but not as big an effort to uncover the environmental ones,” said Robert Wright, MD, Chair, Environmental Medicine and Public Health, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “By providing this funding, The Honest Company has partnered with Mount Sinai in a way that allows us the freedom to determine what environmental factors are most important for children’s health and development. We are grateful to The Honest Company for powering these opportunities for environmental health and science and nurturing our most promising young scientists to devote their talent and efforts to our field.”

“Mount Sinai has been an important partner to us since 2014, and we are proud to further this longstanding relationship by supporting these meaningful research efforts through the Children’s Environmental Health Innovation Grant,” said Christopher Gavigan, Co-Founder and Chief Purpose Officer of The Honest Company. “The Honest Company is committed to helping drive the change we want to see in the world and believes that research initiatives such as these will ultimately help us create a safer, healthier world for children and families.”

About The Honest Company
The Honest Company is dedicated to helping people live happy and healthy lives. Founded in 2012, the mission-driven company provides 100+ safe and effective products across a wide range of consumer categories, including baby, personal care, beauty, home care, and vitamins & supplements, to a passionate community of consumers united by values and style. Honest products are available across the U.S. via honest.com and honestbeauty.com and at more than 17,000 retail locations across North America. The Honest Company is privately held and headquartered in Los Angeles, California.

About the Mount Sinai Health System

Mount Sinai Health System is one of the largest academic medical systems in the New York metro area, with more than 43,000 employees working across eight hospitals, over 400 outpatient practices, nearly 300 labs, a school of nursing, and a leading school of medicine and graduate education. Mount Sinai advances health for all people, everywhere, by taking on the most complex health care challenges of our time — discovering and applying new scientific learning and knowledge; developing safer, more effective treatments; educating the next generation of medical leaders and innovators; and supporting local communities by delivering high-quality care to all who need it.

Through the integration of its hospitals, labs, and schools, Mount Sinai offers comprehensive health care solutions from birth through geriatrics, leveraging innovative approaches such as artificial intelligence and informatics while keeping patients’ medical and emotional needs at the center of all treatment. The Health System includes approximately 7,300 primary and specialty care physicians; 13 joint-venture outpatient surgery centers throughout the five boroughs of New York City, Westchester, Long Island, and Florida; and more than 30 affiliated community health centers. We are consistently ranked by U.S. News & World Report's Best Hospitals, receiving high "Honor Roll" status, and are highly ranked: No. 1 in Geriatrics and top 20 in Cardiology/Heart Surgery, Diabetes/Endocrinology, Gastroenterology/GI Surgery, Neurology/Neurosurgery, Orthopedics, Pulmonology/Lung Surgery, Rehabilitation, and Urology. New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai is ranked No. 12 in Ophthalmology. U.S. News & World Report’s “Best Children’s Hospitals” ranks Mount Sinai Kravis Children's Hospital among the country’s best in several pediatric specialties.

For more information, visit https://www.mountsinai.org or find Mount Sinai on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Related Articles