CLEAR members attend NIEHS’s Partnerships for Environmental Public Health Conference

In February, CLEAR sent a team to the NIEHS Partnerships for Environmental Public Health (PEPH) annual meeting in Durham NC. PEPH is a network of professional engaged in advancing environmental public health research that includes academics, health officials, policy makers and community members. CLEAR team members gave talks and poster presentations about forging intergenerational collaborations and fieldwork in urban brownfield sites.

CLEAR Research Translation team lead Rahul Mitra shared takeaways on effective partnerships between interdisciplinary graduate trainees and undergraduate students, designing community-centered infographics and animation videos for environment public health.

CLEAR trainee Brendan O'Leary who presented his poster, titled "Integrating fieldwork approaches to uncover the environmental health impact of brownfields on urban communities." The objectives for this research are to address the difficulty of sampling VOCs in urban environments. One solution is to build a natural language processing (NLP) program to help create a database of historic environmental reports that is legible for both human and computer processing.

CLEAR Community Advisory Board member Laprisha Daniels and Detroit environmental justice leader Donele Wilkins of the Green Door Initiative also attended and participated on a panel about engaging in environmental justice authentically. The panel focused on discussed how partnerships between academics and community groups can go well, and barriers to engaging in productive partnerships.