Can environmental exposures early on in life affect our health years later? Can our health be also determined by what our ancestors were exposed to? Those are some of the fundamental questions that my laboratory attempts to answer by developing and using state-of-the-art integrative methods. Our work, in particular, aims to dissect the genetic and epigenetic pathways that connect environmental cues to health effects across the lifespan and across generations. We leverage the genetic tractability of the nematode C. elegans as well as ES-cell based models to examine the impact of environmental chemical exposures on germline function and epigenetic homeostasis. The Allard laboratory is part of UCLA's Institute for Society and Genetics and the Molecular Biology Institute.