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Your Environment. Your Health.

Final Progress Reports: University of Iowa: Community Engagement Core

Superfund Research Program

Community Engagement Core

Project Leader: Shannon Lea Watkins
Co-Investigator: Scott N. Spak
Grant Number: P42ES013661
Funding Period: 2006-2025
View this project in the NIH Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools (RePORT)

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Final Progress Reports

Year:   2019  2014  2009 

Community Engagement Core (CEC) engagement efforts have led to advancing scientific education, new partnerships, and progression in reducing polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in schools. The CEC continues to work with Airborne Exposures to Semi-volatile Organic Pollutants (The AESOP Study) Project graduate student researchers Ezazul Haque and Maggie Moran and AESOP Study leader Peter Thorne to address rising community concerns in East Chicago of environmental exposure to lead and arsenic. They have been interacting with East Chicago residents, a local pastor, the NAACP of Indiana, and key players by attending the Community Activist Group monthly meetings, informing the community of the work being done by the Iowa SRP Center (ISRP), and listening to community members concerns and how they can be better addressed. In summer 2019, interim CEC director Brandi Janssen and incoming CEC coordinator Jessica Ferdig worked with Columbus Junction Superintendent Gary Benda to facilitate data collection sites for ISRP trainee Moala Bannavti. Bannavti hung passive air samplers in the school gymnasium, library, and other areas for six weeks. Janssen and Ferdig also met with the Columbus Junction City Clerk, law enforcement officials, and other community members to provide information about the ISRP’s mission and goals and identify opportunities to expand programming beyond the school system and into the wider community. The University of Iowa’s Environmental Health Sciences Research Center and the Iowa SRP Center CEC hosted Anna Goodman Hoover, assistant professor of preventive medicine and environmental health at the University of Kentucky (UKY). Hoover works with the UKY SRP Center CEC, specializing in community engaged communication with rural populations related to PCB exposure. She met with ISRP trainees, staff, and faculty and gave a presentation entitled “Convergent environmental health communication: the intersection of research translation and community engagement.”

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