Superfund Research Program
Administrative Core
Project Leader: Keri C. Hornbuckle
Co-Investigator: Hans-Joachim Lehmler
Grant Number: P42ES013661
Funding Period: 2006-2025
Project-Specific Links
Project Summary (2020-2025)
The Iowa Superfund Research Program (ISRP) is a highly integrated research center focusing on the sources, exposures, toxicities, and remediation of polychlorinated biphenyl (PCBs) congeners in air. The Center’s integration across biomedical and environmental science and engineering disciplines requires organizational infrastructure to enable the frequent, regular exchange of ideas, experiments, and data among projects and cores. The Administrative Core’s major goal is to maintain a structure that promotes research integration, enables timely communication, and supports research translation that raises the quality and impact of center activities. The Administrative Core provides vision and direction to ensure continued success in research and stakeholder engagement. To meet this goal, the Administrative Core has three aims: 1) Provide program leadership and infrastructure to ensure synthesis of findings and integration of activities. Director Hornbuckle and Deputy Director Lehmler are leading environmental health researchers with backgrounds in environmental engineering and biomedical science, respectively. The ISRP Executive Committee, composed of leaders from every program component and representing diverse disciplines, works with Hornbuckle and Lehmler to ensure full integration and coordination among projects and cores. The leadership actively promotes frequent and regular researcher interactions both inside and outside the ISRP through monthly meetings, seminars, and events. The Administrative Core conducts annual assessments of productivity and effectiveness for each project and core to guide recommendations from the External Advisory Committee (EAC), which is composed of nationally recognized Superfund researchers and other stakeholders. 2) Provide administrative and fiscal services, support, and oversight to ensure robust stewardship of available resources. The Director, together with the Center Administrator and Fiscal Manager, provide programmatic and financial services, support, and oversight. The ISRP is housed under and supported by IIHR—Hydroscience & Engineering, which has extensive experience managing multidisciplinary, multi-institutional projects ranging from thousands to tens of millions of dollars. 3) Disseminate ISRP scientific and environmental health discoveries through effective research translation. The ISRP is dedicated to making center research available and accessible in consideration of the SRP research translation objectives: a) communication with SRP and SRP staff; b) partnerships with government agencies; c) technology transfer; and d) information dissemination to other end-users, with a particular focus on communicating in the manner most appropriate for each audience. Regular activities will include the biennial International PCB Workshop; social media news feeds; webinars and training workshops; decision-support tools for agencies and organizations managing PCBs in schools; web applications to disseminate research findings; and development of new technology and platforms to maximize bi-directional communication.