UW Strike vs NIH Salary Caps — Postdocs deserve better pay — Let’s fix the system

Science ran a story on the current UW labor strike for postdoc and research staff salaries. The story mentions that “The strike comes on the heels of a change in state law on 1 January, which mandated that overtime-exempt salaried employees at organizations with 51 or more employees be paid at least $65,484 annually—which is…

Launching the UW Center for Environmental Health Equity (UW CEHE)

Last week, we officially launched a new center at the University of Washington. The UW Center for Environmental Health Equity is one of 17 US EPA and DOE-funded Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers (TCTACs). The UW CEHE is a $12 million initiative to serve Region 10 states (Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington). The center provides…

Earth Day Air Fair

It was great to join the Air Fair hosted by DRCC, and to spend the day with the Duwamish Valley community. There were a number of tables at the Fair, each one providing information and activities related to environmental quality and justice. Community members came by the learn and share their experiences, and pick up…

NIOSH e-News on the WA workers heat exposure study

NIOSH e-News had a nice summary of the recent paper by Flunker et al., on heat exposures experienced by WA workers. The NIOSH e-News summary is available here. The paper is… Flunker, J.C., Zuidema, C., Jung, J., Kasner, E., Cohen, M.,Seto, E., Austin, E., Spector, J.T. (2022) Potential impacts of different occupational outdoor heat exposure thresholds…

Pollution Prevention for WA State

I was looking at US EPA’s P2 program yesterday, which has a very data-rich tool to identify potential opportunities to reduce the toxic release inventory across the US. The tool is called the “Pollution Prevention (P2) Environmental Justice (EJ) Facility Mapping Tool” [here’s the link to it]. There’s a lot going on with the web…

Tribal Roundtable for the Environmental Health Disparities Map

It was great to present at the recent Tribal Roundtable hosted by WA Dept of Health to discuss the Washington Environmental Health Disparities Map and ongoing tribal consultation. In the presentation, I spoke about how the EHD map is an ongoing process, in which we should continue to seek the best methods and data to…

DAISY – A new community-engaged asthma intervention study with the Duwamish River Community Coalition

We excited to be a part of a new NIH-funded asthma intervention study evaluating the effectiveness of linguistically and culturally appropriate healthy homes assessments and low-cost indoor air filtration on children’s asthma symptoms. We’re calling this the Duwamish Air Improvement Study for Youth (DAISY). The Principal Investigators are Prof Anjum Hajat at the UW and…

New US EPA Project — Unlocking the Nationwide Potential of Water Reuse

We are excited to be a part of an exciting new multi-site project funded by the US EPA that aims to better understand the potential for water reuse in the United States by aligning science and technology with a sociological understanding of opportunities and barriers. The project involves multiple teams working on different aspects of…

State-Tribal Affairs, thanks for the Government-to-Government Training

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.

Resources for Developing Community Engaged Research Agreements

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…