Living in the "deep south" may increase the risk of poor health outcomes for children. Disparities in child health indicators, such as percent of low birth-weight infants and infant mortality, exist in a geographic region of contiguous states (Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida) relative to other regions of the United States.1 How a geographic region influences health outcomes is not known, but it may be complex and synergistically related to regional economic, political, social, cultural, and environmental factors.1 A $7.7 million grant from the US Environmental Protection Agency has been awarded to Duke University to create the Southern Center on Environmentally-Driven Disparities in Birth Outcomes to determine how environmental, social, and host factors jointly contribute to health disparities in birth outcomes. Little is known about how genetic and environmental factors combine to promote or prevent adverse outcomes such as low birth weight, preterm birth, and fetal growth restriction. The planned research seeks to disentangle these complicated effects by combining rapidly evolving methods in spatial statistics, genetics, and proteomics in complementary human and animal models of birth outcomes.2

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