The UCLA Center for Occupational and Environmental Health (COEH) is housed within the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences, the School of Nursing, and the David Geffen School of Medicine. It is one of three centers created by 1978 legislation which mandated that the State of California establish education, research and service centers to protect people from work-related hazards. The 1978 legislation was a response to the outbreak of sterility in workers who manufactured the pesticide dibromochloropropane (DBCP) in Lathrop, California. The 1970s were a period of considerable expansion in occupational and environmental health legislation, including passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and a host of other environmental laws at both the federal and state levels, and the creation of federal agencies like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), and the environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Recognizing a need for professionals to protect the public and workers health from emerging threats and to implement the new legislation, the centers were established to develop University of California faculty specializing in occupational health. Since the 1970s there have been significant changes to the landscape of environmental and occupational impacts as the workforce has changed dramatically. One of the most important changes in occupational health has been the recognition of the integral relationship between environmental and occupational health problems, which led the centers to expand the scope of their activities to incorporate environmental health and broader health disciplines in the 1990s. Today faculty contribute to research, training, and service in diverse areas of Community Health Sciences, Epidemiology, Environmental Health, Health Policy & Management, Biostatistics, and Occupational Nursing.