There are four Facility Cores: Analytical (Leaders, Philip Hoepke, Robert Gelein); Biostatistics (Leader, David Oakes); Immunology and Inflammation (Leader, Richard P. Phipps); and Cardiac (Leader, Wojciech Zareba). Each core serves multiple research programs (See the organizational chart). For example, endpoints related to pulmonary inflammatory responses, cardiac events, and blood coagulation cascade, all of which are derived from samples collected in the epidemiological field studies, will be measured by the appropriate core facility. So will samples taken during the controlled clinical studies and toxicological animal studies. The controlled clinical, animal, and in vitro studies will use the same freshly generated carbon particles of ultrafine (~25 nm) and accumulation mode (~250 nm) size at concentrations down to 10 µg/m3. Subsequently, the impact of controlled additions of transition metals to the carbon particles — as determined from ambient PM measurements by the Particle Characterization Research Core — on respiratory and systemic endpoints will be assessed. This coordinated approach — from particles to target cells to animals to humans — allows the extrapolation of results and mechanisms from in vitro studies to the human target, supported further by extensive dosimetric measurements in the animal and clinical studies.