A lot of attention has been paid to genetics in breast cancer as disease rates rise, but most women have no family history of the disease, suggesting that there is an environmental risk we don’t yet understand, says environmental health scientist Laura Vandenberg in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Now she is launching a three-year, $450,000 research program supported by a National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) early career award to investigate the possibility that exposure to estrogen or estrogen-like chemicals in the womb may be a factor. “We already know that the major known risk factor in breast cancer is exposure to estrogen, so girls who enter puberty earlier and women who enter menopause later have higher risk,” she says.