Blog

Every so often, I update various trainings, and last month had the pleasure of attending Government-to-Government training for State-Tribal Affairs. The excellent training was run by the Governor’s Office of Indian Affairs. To learn more about the services provided by the GOIA, including their trainings and connections to State Agency-Tribal Liasons, visit their website here.

Community engaged research involving meaningful engagement on environmental justice topics and work conducted collectively by academic, community organizations, and governmental agency partners can benefit from clearly defined relationships established through agreements, memoranda of understanding, or other types of documents. These documents are used to clearly articulate roles and responsibilities and shared values and principles. The…

I’ve been working with PhD Student Shanise Owens to analyze structural racism –historical African American housing descrimination and its association with chronic disease risk in subsequent generations. As part of this work, we are analyzing the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) maps curated and provided by the Mapping Inequality group. Because the historical maps do…

There is great interest in community noise due to environmental justice concerns. In previous studies, we’ve demonstrated the associations between measured urban noise and roadway traffic, and the ability to model urban noise using traffic data in different US cities. In more recent work in Seattle, we’ve demonstrated citizen science process to collect and map…

New story came out today on the work our group is doing with Dr. Debby Tsuang’s group in the UW Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the Geriatric Research, Education, and Clinical Center at VA Puget Sound Health Care System to evaluate three different remote/at-home methods of assessing cognitive and mental health of older…

Our group is continuing to find ways to contribute to environmental justice initiatives in the state. Last week, I started serving on the Technical Workgroup for the WA EHD Map. The WA Environmental Health Disparities Map was led by Front & Centered, developed through listening sessions with community groups, and implemented by various community, governmental…

I have recently started working with UW Earthlab and the One Roof Foundation to document the impact of new grants provided to Seattle-area non-profit organizations to advance work towards environmental justice and social change. The One Roof Foundation is a relatively new organization, which serves as the philanthropic arm of the Climate Pledge Arena and…

Last week, our group had our first successful deployment of monitors for a new project aimed at improving air quality at homeless shelters in King County. As part of the efforts of Public Health Seattle King County in deploying thousands of portable HEPA air cleaners to help control the transmission of COVID-19 in congregate settings,…

Today, our group released findings from an analysis of seasonal construction workers and ambient PM2.5 concentrations in Washington State over the last decade (Analysis conducted by Chris Zuidema, pre-print paper, currently in peer-review). The analysis estimates the potential impact of wildfire smoke on exposures to construction workers — a workforce of approximately 200,000 workers in…

In previous posts, I commented on the evidence for wildfire smoke protection for outdoor workers. Today’s release of Washington Labor & Industries’ new emergency rule has important distinctions from the previous draft rule: The new emergency rule has two action levels. Before working in PM2.5 concentration of 20.5 µg/m3 (AQI=69) employers must provide workers with…