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- All right, thank you. It's great to have met you and I'm honored to be here today. I'm an assistant professor, uh, yeah, hey you know? What, all goes you know, 2020 people, 2020, no just kidding. Let's just jump right in, right? So, I'm an environmental scientist and this is what I deal with, right? Environmental contamination is prevalent in the United States. This is a map of all federally designated clean up sites and if we think about this in proximity to you, we think about, one in four Americans live within three miles of a hazardous waste site. So this makes me uncomfortable. There is also a level of complacency we might see in our society but the big thing is, this is unjust. Okay and I guess to speak more plainly, this pisses me off. Primarily because we know from a health stand point that your socioeconomic factors and your physical environment will contribute more to your health outcomes as you age then previously thought. It was thought that you had your genetic makeup and what you were born with and your genetics would purely dictate your health outcome. And we know that your zip code could be more important than your genetic code and it is this disparity in health outcomes that motivates myself and students and my colleagues. If we think about right, so what do you do? People do revitalization efforts, community gardening is a bid deal, right? We know that community gardens or gardening in general can serve as a public health intervention and prevention tactic. We know it increases access to foods, green space, reduces the cost of food and we are actually seeing 37 million households are working and doing vegetable gardening. And so, unfortunately, right? Soils can be a sink for pollutants and this may pose a threat to public health. Well we do not want this to be the case. I don't want pollution to diminish the public health power of a community garden. And so gardens in the research in the lab that I run, we use gardens as hubs for public health intervention and environmental health literacy efforts. The first question that's, so I work with these community members, this is in Yavapai County, this is a legacy mining site, where community members asked, are my soils safe? Is it safe for me to consume the vegetables from my garden, if so how much? This question was posed at an Environmental Protection Agency community meeting I was there, I was documenting community questions, afterwards, I went up to those community members and said that's a great question. I don't have site specific answers but would you like to work together? And two years later, I was able to get some money they were able to network throughout their community and Gardenroots was launched. The other project that I'll talk about briefly is Project Harvest. So if you think about people are growing foods, we are in Arizona an arid, semi- arid environment, we harvest rainwater and this rainwater, people are using this rainwater to irrigate their crops and they ask the question, hey Monica, what's the quality of this water, is it safe for me to use on crops I'm going to eat? That question was also asked in parallel with researchers in my department and boom we get a project which is looking at the quality of harvested rainwater. So here is a map, here is just showing the selected communities. You can see the names, the top one Dewey-Humboldt, that is not Chester Cheetahs house, right? That is mind healing waste with about the average concentration of arsenic is about 3,000 mg per kg, in general background soils in that area are around 30 mg per kg. These are aerial shots of Hayden- Winkelman with one of the last copper smelters operating in the United States and Globe- Miami, which is an active mine as well. And the top one, Chester Cheetah's house is legacy and no longer in operation. And I'll also highlight Tucson, Arizona, which has one of the largest ground water contamination sites but it also has other toxic release inventories sites. So when you're working with these community members there are federal and state government involvement and they use a risk assessment paradigm to decide clean up standards. So they identify the hazard, they conduct an exposure assessment, they'll do and compare that exposure to a dose response curb and then they'll do some mathematical magic and they'll say okay, based on this we can expect one out of a hundred thousand people to develop cancer over their lifetime. So this means we need to clean up to, blank amount to get the risk a little lower. So this is the type of framework and clean up operation that the community members are being exposed to. So to address this, and to do collaborative or democratize the scientific process to increase public participation and environmental health decision making co-creation is the route. Here you can see the methodology, this is methods that I employ based on the expertise of others, the scaffolding of knowledge and experience. So the first thing to highlight is aligning research and education with community priority. You plan for the co-management of the project you engage as many steps as you possibly can, you incorporate multiple forms of knowledge. This is done through a peer education model looking at people who share similar social backgrounds or life experiences are part of the project, so in this case or community health workers are employed and part of the research team. You share the data and you use a cultural model of risk communication so that the date being shared can be readily applied to their experience. So with that you'll hear about Gardenroots and you'll hear about Project Harvest. Gardenroots, you can see, this is the methodology from community concern but for today I'll just highlight the translation of results but you can see visually the multiple steps they go on to carry out this type of work. I highlight community gathering and data sharing events these are places where we come together, we eat and we talk about the information. People aren't, as I stated in one of the open discussions, people are intrinsically and extrinsically motivated to receive this data, they are actively participating in the scientific method and so they come to this event to get there information and to discuss it with their peers and with the and researchers. So components of reporting back environmental health data to participants, here's some citations, but ultimately what does the people want? So they ask me. So here you can see descriptive information. What did you find? What did you look for? How much was there? Is that high? Is that safe? Where do I focus my time and efforts on? Where did that chemical come from? And lastly, what can or should I do? And so this is the type of formula when your data sharing with these community members. Components of a results booklet, so here I'm highlighting Gardenroots materials, a letter and important information, the guide to reading your results is critical. So in this case, if we looked at the data sharing book for Gardenroots in Dewey-Humboldt, there concentration and soil, like arsenic and heavy metal concentrations in soil, vegetables and water was reported. Reported how much they could eat at various target risks and that allowed them to compare the risk posed by the various exposure routes, so they could make a decision on where to reduce their exposure. I also had nutritional content in the vegetables because of course, someone was like, Monica they are going to stop eating vegetables and I said no, I trust that they'll be able to understand the information to actually continue to eat the vegetables but change gardening behavior practices. So a big thing, so you can imagine, you know I always like sitting in the dark, with the data looking at all the numbers it's super romantic an awesome and I wish I had more time to do it. And so I'm basically saying, all right, I'm going to choose this target risk and report how much they can eat from their garden. And then it was like three in the morning and I looked up and I was like, why am I choosing their target risk? So I made these tables, individualized booklets for each participant, it's your choice to decide what target risk you want to consume or you want to use to make decisions about how much to eat from your garden. And this really became a good education tool about the risk assessment process. So if your risk adverse, right? Saying I want to be the most conservative, I want one out of a million excess lifetime cancer risk, in addition to my existing cancer risks in society, so I'm only going to have, one and half cups of tomatoes from my garden a week. But then in the same meeting you'll have someone whose like, , I'm good. And they'll be like one out of 10,000 and you'll say, okay, bet your gonna make the best salsa 'cause your making a 150 cups, your gonna eat a 150 cups of tomatoes and this became comical but also the point of explaining how risk assessment is done and unveiling the math behind it all. So here's the graphic, right, but mathematically it wasn't showing them this is the calculation, this is how the decisions are made and explaining this so that they could start to increase their capacity and they could start to engage the regulatory agencies in the clean up process. And at that meeting participants re-calculated their exposure because they looked at me and their saying, okay, your assuming that I'm going to uh, here's my, you gave me the concentration of arsenic in my radish and you think I eat radishes everyday? Or you think I eat brussel sprouts everyday? Right? So that became quickly where they could see how if they changed the variable in this calculations how their risk would change. Gardenroots 2.0, right? Starting in 2015, having a Master of Fine Arts student part of my work, we started to do with different visualizations and lay outs. Again, giving people a point of comparison and explanation of their units and their results. And in this case we tried a more topographic or a different way of looking at the data set where the maximum contaminant level, right? So if you're in water what is the maximum contaminant level for that contaminant under the Safe Drinking Water Act is presented here in red. Your value would be in green, other samples in the data would be that shady, sandy gray or brown in the background and any exceedances would be highlighted in yellow. So we just actually, this paper was accepted earlier this year of what participants gained from this type of data sharing and ways to improve it. This was also showing vegetable data there are no standards necessarily in the United States for these contaminants in your foods, there are pesticide residues but not necessarily some of these heavy metals and arsenic particularly. And so we compare them too the Market Basket Study but also by the Codex Alimentarius set by the World Health Organization, which are recommended values. Because ultimately, people want to know is this high? Five minutes, rock on. Here we go. Perfect for talking about, so this is wrapping up Gardenroots of looking at really focusing on soils and the plant and how much they could eat. With Project Harvest it's much more circled around the rainwater, right? In this case with Project Harvest this is funded by the National Science Foundation, thank you very much, and this is looking at, with this data sharing experience, we did randomly assign participants to a traditional data vis, which was associated primarily and revolved around a booklet. Then we also had a again, incorporating the arts, an art student, Dorsey Kaufmann, who then took the data set and translated that into vibrations. And so you won't hear about ripple effect but you will hear about the booklet experience and then ripple effect. So this is what's going on at Project Harvest that will be being teased out of what learners gain from this intervention of an experiential learning experience. But if we look at what it took to build this puppy, so if anyone stopped by, right, yesterday, the booklets a little hefty but it's reporting back 33 chemicals that could be, that we measured in the rainwater. So lets go back to the , so these guys are the liaisons and community advocates and my esteem colleagues that I love working with. Each of of them, they work in each of the communities and we can see here that they guided and informed all visual information. So we did this through formative evaluation, we had everyone come together, we'd give them some materials and they'd essentially go through it and give us comments and feedback. We have weekly meetings where they continue to work through the materials, which was then presented to internal and external advisory boards. So this material went through a lot of renditions, if you could imagine starting out something simple as keeping it gray scale and highlighting the data point that is there's to then incorporating shade to then incorporating some color, to then have shape color and block everything here. We ended up agreeing up a visualization of which I'll show in a little bit but the other big thing was framing the data. So how do you know if this is something of concern? Well what we did was we asked them how do you use your rainwater? And with that, based on how they use their rainwater we selected standards. And so here you can see these are existing standards for water in the United States. Primarily, there is no standard for these elements and contaminants in rainwater, so we compared them to drinking water 'cause some participants do want to drink their harvested rainwater. People fill swimming pools with it so we have the surface water standards if you were going to swim in a lake or a river and then we also have livestock and poultry 'cause they were giving it to their animals. And so here's what, you can imagine, this is the final rendition of that visualization after going about 12 different versions with the ,you can see here we're highlighting the rainwater sample in comparison to the field blank they collected. So they could see right away if there had been any form of contamination while sampling. We could then see the comparative values in the purple and the blueish line here, and the yellow line represented the limit of detection of the instrument that we used to detect that element. Which was critical to also have in a discussion about scientific methods. And so this was within the booklet we explained each of the standards and also explained how to read the graphic itself. And as always, right? You want to make sure that you provide strategies for reducing exposure, so you can't just give the data without actually giving way to reduce their exposure and ways to get more information. So these are some examples of that material and also within Project Harvest in their booklet, they were given a chart that says, if you are above this value what should you do? And so immediately, right when they got their data they could see their point, compare it to the reference standards provided, compare it to the other community members in their vicinity in their community, and then go to see what action they need to take. And all of that was within and contained within the booklet and we then had a focus group to discuss if they had any further questions or needed anymore assistance with interpretation. And so here's highlighting, this is a big team for Project Harvest, I'm highlighting Dorsey Kaufmann, we worked very closely and worked together on the data visualization and information design and massive thanks to all the participants of Gardenroots and Project Harvest over the years because this work is, they provide the research question and we work on this together and I'm very thankful and honored to be welcomed in their community to address these issues. Thank you.