When Burchard returned to his hometown of San Francisco a few years after his residency for a pulmonology fellowship at UCSF, he established cohorts to study how genetic and environmental risk factors associated with race and ethnicity influence asthma in black and Latino kids.25 Realizing he’d never be able to recruit a large sample of low-income minority children from academic research and referral centers, Burchard partnered with clinicians and community health workers across the country who had already established strong ties with patients. Combined, the cohorts represent more than 9,000 children with asthma from centers across the United States, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. They make up the largest gene–environment study of asthma in minority children in the United States.
