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“It’s critical for me,” she said. “I don’t do things for other people that I wouldn’t also do for my family.”

Experiences with her neighborhood, her church, her mother and her grandfather – who lived to age 101 – have instilled her with a curiosity to understand the intricacies of community health, especially in Black communities. What makes them resilient? What inequities do they face, and how can they be resolved?

“Public health is actually giving people tools to be able to care for themselves and their families.”

Outreach has been at the heart of Jackson Scott’s roles. On the advice of her mother, she has endeavored not to do things by halves. She has worked in finance, organizational strategy, career development, marketing and administration in order to understand how all of these aspects work together to affect cultural change in higher education and health care.

Many of her outreach efforts have come in partnership with her family. To contribute to workforce development, she and her husband co-founded the GIA Community Development Corporation – a nonprofit organization that connects youth to skill and career-building opportunities. Jackson Scott also works with her sister, Karen Scott, MD, in the mentorship of women in marginalized communities, connecting them with educational opportunities needed to build skills, cultivate self-awareness and shape future careers.

Her belief that education is the great equalizer has now brought her to the Gillings School, where she uses business modeling and operational excellence strategies as part of a collective effort to advance public health initiatives. Jackson Scott embraces public health 3.0 – a modern concept of public health infrastructure that takes a holistic view on the aspects of a community that contribute to overall health and well-being.

“You can tell a person how to eat right or what they need to do for their health. But they may be hungry, or they may not have a job,” she explained. “Solving that bigger-picture challenge is one of the great things about some of the public health programs that I’ve seen.”

Since coming to Gillings, she has drawn inspiration every day from the work of students, faculty and staff and how it touches the lives of those affected by health inequities.

“Public health is really that full circle,” she says. “It’s not just what we say: ‘from global to local.’ It’s actually giving people tools to be able to care for themselves and their families.”

“The best part of working at Gillings is the great people who work as a team. No matter your department or whether you’re faculty, staff or student, we’re all working toward the same goal of creating a thriving environment for learning,” says Wishart, who began working at the School’s facilities office in 2002. “I have a great facilities group that makes the School inviting, and we are lucky to have a part to play in facilitating so many of the achievements that come out of the Gillings School.”

While growing up in Lumberton, North Carolina, Wishart often came to Chapel Hill for football and basketball games. Working on campus now, he enjoys the excitement of each new semester and the constant opportunity to work with new people on projects and events – whether it’s a student career fair or a food truck rodeo to celebrate the last day of class.

“There is no such thing as a typical day,” Wishart says. “Every day provides an opportunity to help ensure important research and learning is advanced at the School.”

With that in mind, Wishart and his team, which includes Facilities Coordinator Julie McManus and Facilities Assistant David King, execute facility changes – for example, dealing with scheduling challenges posed by a $10-million lab upgrade or implementing noise and dust abatement strategies due to an auditorium renovation – in a way that prioritizes the School’s learning and research missions. “These types of facility issues intersect with busy classrooms, student study needs, research and work spaces,” Wishart says, “so we use planning and project management to help connect all of these parts so that our operations can run as smoothly as possible.”

In recognition of his work, Wishart received the School’s Staff Excellence Award in 2008, with colleagues praising his helpfulness, calm demeanor and good humor. In addition to his full-time job, Wishart recently earned a master’s degree in project management. His thesis project: writing a manual for project management at the Gillings School.

“Brent is our resident superhero. He quietly handles a huge array of facilities issues, including many that are stressful for those involved, and I have yet to see him respond with anything other than calm efficiency and a dry wit,” McManus says. “Taking care of the Gillings campus, its students, faculty and staff comes very naturally to him – and he inspires it in others as well.”

Jess Edwards, PhD

Assistant Professor of Epidemiology

Research interests: epidemiologic methods, infectious diseases, causal inference

Tanya Garcia, PhD

Associate Professor of Biostatistics

Research interests: longitudinal data analysis, neurogenerative diseases, prediction models, survival analysis

Lisa Gralinski, PhD

Assistant Professor of Epidemiology

Research interests: the host and viral genetic factors that drive coronavirus disease severity that can be harnessed to develop new avenues of therapeutic intervention for emerging coronavirus like COVID-19

Abigail Hatcher, PhD

Assistant Professor of Health Behavior

Research interests: social interventions for health, HIV care and treatment in the context of intimate partner violence, mental ill health, and poverty

Lauren Hill, PhD, MSPH

Assistant Professor of Health Behavior

Research interests: behavioral interventions to address determinants of HIV/AIDS risk and treatment outcomes.

Chantel Martin, PhD

Assistant Professor of Epidemiology

Research interests: social epidemiology and life course theory; reproductive, perinatal and pediatric epidemiology; biological markers of health

Amanda Northcross, PhD

Associate Professor of Environmental Sciences and Engineering

Research interests: using chemistry and engineering to identify exposures to air pollution and to develop interventions to reduce pollution

Arrianna Planey, PhD, MA

Assistant Professor of Health Policy & Management

Research interests: interactions between health policies, healthcare access and utilization, and underlying population-level health inequities

Timothy Sheahan, PhD

Assistant Professor of Epidemiology

Research interests: developing broad-spectrum therapeutics to treat coronavirus infections like COVID-19 and those that may emerge in the future

Bonnie Shook-Sa, DRPH

Clinical Assistant Professor of Biostatistics

Research interests: causal inference, survey sampling, infectious diseases, epidemiology

Lisa Spees, PhD

Assistant Professor of Health Policy & Management

Research interests: improving access to care, social epidemiology, application of implementation science to cancer, large population-based datasets

Emma Tzioumis, PhD

Assistant Professor of Nutrition

Research interests: maternal and child nutrition, both globally and locally – specifically malnutrition, complementary feeding and maternal experiences in the perinatal period

Karen Volmar, JD, MPH

Associate Professor of Health Policy & Management

Research interests: utilizing program evaluation and legal research to inform health policy development

Ciara Zachary, MPH, PhD

Assistant Professor of Health Policy & Management

Research interests: state and federal policy analysis; increasing access to affordable and quality care, especially to underserved populations; Medicaid

Read Gillings faculty spotlight to hear more about four of these faculty members.

Tanya Garcia, PhD

Associate Professor of Biostatistics

• Research interests: longitudinal data analysis, neurogenerative diseases, prediction models, survival analysis
• How do you unwind? Salsa dancing and making up games with my daughter *Professor Garcia was in the early stages of labor while responding for this article. She gave birth to a son soon after.
• _‍_COVID aside, what do you see as the biggest issue in public health today? Reporting stat results in an understandable way that can help public policy

Arrianna Planey, PhD, MA

‍Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management

• Research interests: interactions between health policies, healthcare access and utilization, and underlying population-level health inequities
• How do you unwind? I like to cook and bake! I rarely cook the same thing more than once every six months, so there is a lot of variety on the menu. On the shelf, my husband and I have Japanese, Lebanese, Indian, Italian and Soul Food cookbooks. We use them fairly frequently.
• COVID aside, what do you see as the biggest issue in public health today? Structural racism. No matter what other public health issue or outcome you name, racism contours outcomes in terms of who is most exposed to hazards, who has access to resources to maintain and improve their health and well-being, and the distribution of morbidity and preventable deaths.

Amanda Northcross, PhD

‍‍Associate Professor of Environmental Sciences and Engineering

• Research interests: using chemistry and engineering to identify exposures to air pollution and to develop interventions to reduce pollution.
• How do you unwind? I like to take my dog for a walk, have a nice glass of wine and watch a movie with my husband.
• COVID aside, what do you see as the biggest issue in public health today? The effects of racial injustice permeate every corner of our society and make it impossible for us to achieve health equity. We must end systemic racism.

Emma Tzioumis, PhD

Assistant Professor of Nutrition

• Research interests: maternal and child nutrition, both globally and locally – specifically malnutrition, complementary feeding and maternal experiences in the perinatal period.
• How do you unwind? Spending time with the family outside hiking, biking, camping, engaging in whatever activity the kids are currently enjoying. On any given day there is a high probability you’ll find me watching my kids tear around the pump track at Martin Luther King Jr. Park in Carrboro. One of my favorite ways to unwind solo is to go to the grocery store by myself on a Saturday night after bedtime.
• COVID aside, what do you see as the biggest issue in public health today? Racism. It is pervasive and at the root of every system, institution and discipline.

“The field of global health is so different than where it was 20 years ago, even 10 years ago! We need to be ahead of the curve when it comes to training researchers and practitioners to continue to lead in the field of global health,” said Maman, who joined Gillings in 2005. “Our focus on local-global and the interdisciplinary emphasis of our training and research will serve us well in terms of continuing to shape future global health leaders.”

Recognized for her research, student mentoring, teaching and service, Maman will continue with her faculty appointment as professor of health behavior and co-lead for the Master of Public Health Program’s global health concentration, which she helped to develop and launch two years ago. She succeeds Margaret (Peggy) Bentley, PhD, Carla Smith Chamblee Distinguished Professor of global nutrition, who served as associate dean for 17 years.

“Our focus on local-global and the interdisciplinary emphasis of our training and research will serve us well in terms of continuing to shape future global health leaders.”

A national and international leader in global health research, practice and education, Maman’s work has focused on the intersection of intimate partner violence and HIV/AIDS. Programs she has developed with global colleagues and community partners have helped mitigate women’s risks from both violence and HIV/AIDS. She has collaborated with the World Health Organization, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other governmental health agencies and educational institutions to advance this work.

“Gillings has so much depth and breadth in the work that we do addressing health challenges outside the U.S., particularly in our flagship international sites including Malawi, Zambia, South Africa and Vietnam. But we also have outstanding examples of work that our faculty, alumni and students are doing in global health here in the United States,” she says. “This includes taking lessons learned from our international work and applying it to work in the U.S. and vice versa, and addressing transnational health issues like COVID that have the same social determinants at their core, such as poverty, gender, race and ethnicity.”

Maman collaborates with colleagues within the School’s Research, Innovation and Global Solutions unit to integrate global initiatives into innovation, entrepreneurship and research, and lead programming that supports the School’s domestic and international students. She also will continue to partner closely with key research centers and institutes and enhance partnerships with global organizations and leaders.

“I believe we need to continue growing our global-local partnerships to expand our global footprint and continue to set us apart from our peers,” she says.

Capstone is a yearlong community-led, mentored service-learning course for second-year master’s students in the Health Behavior concentration and the Health Equity, Social Justice and Human Rights (EQUITY) concentration. The scope of work is based on the community organization’s needs, and students produce deliverables that meet their thesis requirement. Annually, capstone students provide more than $255,000 of in-kind service to partner organizations.

“The capstone course is an opportunity for students to translate all the gold standards they’ve learned in the curriculum to real-world public health problems – and to wrestle with the tension of knowing that the gold standard can’t always be implemented in a community-based setting,” says Meg Landfried, MPH, assistant professor of health behavior and the department’s capstone director. “The community partners benefit from the work done by enthusiastic students who are embedded in current public health practices and trends.”

“Everyone who comes to Gillings is passionate about building partnerships. The capstone allows us to put this into practice.”

Over the past decade, 65 capstone partners have worked with student teams. Partner organizations define the scope of the capstone project, prioritizing their specific needs and giving students an opportunity to do applied public health work in a variety of settings with diverse populations. The Chatham County Council on Aging has worked with consecutive capstone teams, along with three summer interns from Gillings.

“Given our aging demographic in Chatham, we saw the need for a comprehensive plan for our county but lacked the capacity to undertake a significant and complex project of this nature. The capstone team brought tremendous energy, creativity, talent and commitment to the project,” said Dennis W. Streets, the Council’s executive director and a 1978 Master of Public Health graduate.

Community partners must be within an hour’s drive of campus and work in the public health space, particularly health equity. Potential partners submit a proposal each year and, if selected, attend “Pitch Day,” where they talk with students about working with them. (2020’s Pitch Day was virtual due to COVID-19.) Student teams and faculty advisers are matched with organizations based on their interest. A preceptor within the community organization supervises the team’s work. This year, 51 students were split into teams and matched up with 11 community partners.

For second-year health behavior student Isabella Pallotto, the chance to work with the State Trauma Advisory Council was an opportunity she could not pass up. She’s part of a five-student team working with the Council, an organization of hospitals and trauma treatment facilities throughout North Carolina, to improve care for pediatric trauma patients.

“Most members of our team want to partner public health with medicine in some way, which is why we all picked something with a medical focus,” said Pallotto, who plans to earn a doctoral degree in clinical psychology and work in a hospital as a clinical pediatric psychologist. “Everyone who comes to Gillings is passionate about building partnerships. The capstone allows us to put this into practice. We’re not just learning to write a paper. We gain professional team experience doing a big project and working with community members to make a real difference. It’s one of the reasons I was drawn to Gillings.”

2020 Capstone Program

Community partners benefit from the work done by enthusiastic students who are embedded in current public health practices and trends.

• 51 Master's students
• 11 community partners
• $255,000 in-kind services to partners given annually

Through more than 80 years of public health education and research at UNC, the Gillings community is reminded that the mission to advance health equity can save lives. Black lives matter. Work at the Gillings School requires intention and introspection, acknowledging the need to incorporate anti-racism into all facets of scholarship, policy and community action.

“The events of 2020 helped expose that racism, not race, is the root cause of multiple health inequities,” said Kauline Cipriani, PhD, associate dean for inclusive excellence and associate professor in the Public Health Leadership Program. “Inclusive excellence at Gillings is critical now, more than ever, if we are to adequately prepare the next generation of public health practitioners and researchers to achieve our mission of reducing health inequities in North Carolina and globally.”

Rising to the challenge

The events of 2020 have exposed the need for critical and urgent solutions to systemic racism.

In response to the collision of crises in 2020, the inclusive excellence team, led by Cipriani, launched the Emergency Preparedness, Ethics and Equity webinar series, which explores social inequities unearthed by the pandemic and our response to it. The series has covered topics such as protection for incarcerated persons, elevating and recentering LGBTQ+ health, and how faith leaders are sustaining community.

Leadership at the Gillings School is committed to full implementation of the Inclusive Excellence Action Plan, and advances have been made in each of six strategic focus areas. Faculty, staff and students have participated in trainings on anti-racism and creating inclusive environments in academic spaces. For the second year in a row, efforts in this area were recognized with receipt of the Health Professions Higher Education Excellence in Diversity (HEED) Award.

Raising awareness

This year is the 50th anniversary of the Minority Student Caucus (MSC), which advocates for students of color in the Gillings School and promotes research and programs addressing health concerns that affect people of color. Since 1977, the MSC has led the annual Minority Health Conference, which has addressed topics ranging from community-based research, social determinants of health, systems of power and more.

The 2021 Minority Health Conference was an all-virtual event held on Feb. 25-26. Co-led by health policy and management graduate students Rachel Singley and Shewit Weldense, its theme, “Body and Soul,” explored avenues of health activism that go beyond the scope of politics.

“We wanted to focus on spiritual, mental and emotional health but also on health activism and how that takes many forms,” Singley explained. “This was inspired by the events of the summer following George Floyd’s murder. People are looking for grassroots and ‘boots-on-the-ground’ activists to be our voice more than ever instead of looking to politicians.”

The conference attracts attendees and speakers from across the country, and this year’s virtual format brought the opportunity to reach an audience on a broader scale. Keynote speakers were Wizdom Powell, PhD, and Sharelle Barber, ScD, MPH.

Reconnecting and reengaging

The Minority Health Conference is a highlight for many, including Gillings School alumni, who often travel from across the country to attend. On the night before the 2020 conference, alumna Stephanie Baker, PhD, Dean Barbara Rimer, DrPH, and Cipriani led a reception to connect with many of these alumni. Called “Reengage,” the event was both a reflection and a recognition that in 80 years of work towards equity at the Gillings School, there is still room for improvement and more work to be done. To that end, Baker and fellow alumna Anita Holmes co-founded the Alumni Inclusive Excellence Committee to further advance goals for inclusiveness and equity at the Gillings School.

During the Reengage event, alumni and leaders came together to develop strategies to grow a more equitable Gillings community.

Advancing research into health equity

Systemic inequities caused by racism, discrimination and unequal access can deny people the most important elements that contribute to good health and well-being, like quality education, good jobs, decent and affordable housing, safe neighborhoods and environments, clean water, nutritious foods, and adequate healthcare.

A majority of faculty at the Gillings School have published work on health equity. Get to know two who are continuing to contribute to equitable health outcomes, both in research and in practice.

Highlighting work in health equity

Carmen Samuel-Hodge, PhD, RD

Associate Professor, Department of Nutrition

Before arriving in Chapel Hill, Carmen Samuel-Hodge, PhD, RD, spent nine years as a dietician in the United States Virgin Islands. She came to the Gillings School to research personalized strategies that could improve community health care needs.

Location, diet, support systems and access to health care resources are all factors that impact the management of conditions like Type 2 diabetes and hypertension, and they play a major role in the health disparities observed in communities of color and rural populations.

“If you know enough about that context,” Samuel-Hodge explains, “then you can personalize the way you approach a patient’s chronic care management.” And yet these approaches are happening far less often than necessary.

The data on health disparities are clear, and the issues caused by health inequities are numerous, but the complex strategies needed to address them can be paralyzing for public health professionals. When inequalities must be addressed simultaneously on levels of policy, economics or housing, the pace of change can seem dauntingly slow.

Samuel-Hodge – whose focus is on behavior change related to food among Black Americans and those with lower income – sees her work as a critical part of that change. While systemic adjustments are necessary, a single policy can have disproportionate effects across different communities. This makes individual interventions just as necessary.

“It’s going to be difficult, but somebody needs to attend to it. These communities are here, and they deserve quality care.”

“When I first started working with diabetes self-management, I found the research priorities were moving away from interventions to policy, systems and environmental change,” she says. “But the people with these conditions still wanted better care that would suit their needs. What are they supposed to do while waiting for policies and systems to change?”

The search for approaches led Samuel-Hodge to the field of community engagement through translational and implementation research. She is an associate professor of nutrition at the Gillings School and leads the Evaluation Core at the UNC Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention. She is also embedded as a translational and implementation research specialist at the Granville Vance Health Department, where she adapts clinical data into actionable and customizable care strategies for rural and underserved communities.

“For these communities, the research has to be practice-based, because you work with what you have already,” she explains. “And then you test what strategies and what systems work better than others.”

This approach is necessary because many study cohorts do not reflect the communities that are disproportionately affected by the conditions being researched. The strategies based on study results are often too complex and expensive for smaller regions to implement, and they may take a longer time to produce significant change in outcomes.

For Samuel-Hodge, the challenge is in identifying how to adapt core elements of research into interventions that can work with the resources available in smaller populations.

“It’s going to be difficult, but somebody needs to attend to it,” she says. “These communities are here, and they deserve quality care.”

Through her work, she has endeavored to address structural issues of health equity, and in 2020, she was honored with the inaugural Gillings Faculty Award for Excellence in Health Equity Research.

Dana Rice, DrPH

Assistant professor, public health leadership program; Assistant Dean for Master’s Degree Programs

The United States has the largest incarcerated population in the world, and that population is experiencing negative public health outcomes as a direct result of the country’s mass incarceration policies.

Dana Rice, DrPH, assistant dean for master’s degree programs and assistant professor in the Public Health Leadership Program, began her career in public health in search of strategies to prevent the spread of infectious diseases within the correctional system. But she soon found that the health of people who are incarcerated was inextricably linked to challenges at a systemic level.

“I started off studying HIV and STD prevention in jails,” she says, “because we know the risk factors for developing certain infectious diseases are similarly aligned with the risk factors that lead to someone being incarcerated. As I worked within the system, I came to realize it’s not serving people, either for improving health outcomes or preventing crime. Studies have shown that incarceration is least effective at doing either of those things.”

“Public health disparities are seen more acutely in populations that have been incarcerated or that have contact with the criminal legal system.”

Rice says the criminal legal system is having a net negative impact because it’s not designed to support health and well-being. And because of discrepancies in the way the law is applied across communities, people of color and other marginalized populations bear the heaviest burden of that impact.

“The disparities we observe in public health are seen more acutely in populations that have been incarcerated or that have contact with the criminal legal system,” Rice explains. “There’s nothing about interacting with the system that improves access to things like housing or education, which are the exact things that make communities safe and healthy. Even moving downstream, there are negative implications – what we call collateral consequences.”

Collateral consequences are legal restrictions imposed on those with a criminal conviction that create barriers for re-entry into society. A criminal conviction can impact a person’s ability to find housing or employment, own property, get an education, vote or gain access to social services. These consequences increase the risk of recidivism and undermine the criminal legal system’s ostensible goal of rehabilitation.

And they don’t just impact those who have been incarcerated.

“Removing someone from a community has an impact at a family level, and it disrupts social cohesion,” Rice says. “When you remove so many people from certain communities, you can create total disruption of the social capital that exists, which is important for physical and psychosocial well-being. Couple that with the other social- and political-determinant-of-health challenges experienced by under-resourced and marginalized communities, and you have an unhealthy environment for everyone.”

In her current research, Rice examines how a broader system transformation can improve health outcomes for people who have been marginalized. This approach allows for thoughtful considerations of how the system impacts people before, during and after incarceration.

“I don’t talk about the system as the ‘criminal justice system’ – I call it the ‘criminal legal system,’ because I think it’s questionable whether the system has been just to everyone,” she says. “We’re at a tipping point where people recognize the need to do something about it. You cannot have a conversation around creating a healthy, equitable and just society that centers human rights if you leave out the discussion of how mass criminalization and mass incarceration have affected communities.”

Jason West, PhD and Gregory Characklis, PhD

Jason West, PhD, professor of environmental sciences and engineering at the Gillings School, uses sophisticated computer models of the atmosphere to examine the link between climate change and air pollution. By analyzing how modeled changes in air pollution affect global populations, West’s lab provided one of the first comprehensive glimpses of how climate change and air pollution affect public health globally.

“Climate change and air pollution are interrelated, and they are more important for global public health than people appreciate,” says West, noting that ambient air pollution contributes to about 4.5 million premature deaths worldwide each year – about 1 of every 13 deaths globally — and is a risk factor for increased mortality from heart attacks. Alternatively, stroke, lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Because greenhouse gases and air pollution are emitted by the same sources, West says, there are opportunities to address climate change — such as energy efficiency and moving away from coal as an energy source — that improve air quality at the same time.

“The train has left the station. Even as we reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we are going to continue experiencing the impacts of climate change for many years to come, and one of the biggest questions is, how do we adapt most effectively?”

West’s models suggest that a significant global effort to reduce climate change could avoid about 500,000 premature deaths by 2030, and more than 2 million by 2100, mainly from reductions in air pollutants emitted by the same sources. His research also indicates that the benefits of these health improvements would exceed the costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

“By taking action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we are also reducing air pollution and improving human health,” West says. “It’s important to think about strategies that do both.”

While many climate-change strategies are geared toward mitigation, Gregory Characklis, PhD, William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Environmental Sciences and Engineering is working toward solutions that focus on adaptation. As director of the Center on Financial Risk in Environmental Systems, Characklis and his team develop computer models that analyze the risks of extreme weather events like droughts and flooding, and what steps in terms of improved infrastructure and regulatory systems can be taken to adapt to these changes.

“The train has left the station. Even as we reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we are going to continue experiencing the impacts of climate change for many years to come, and one of the biggest questions is, how do we adapt most effectively?” he says. “In order to determine that, we have to better understand the risks: what impacts is climate change likely to have, how often and how severe those impacts are likely to be, and what actions can we take to limit the adverse effects?”

Water utilities, for example, are weighing how to address increasingly frequent droughts and hot weather that lead to demand spikes, while remaining financially stable so they can continue serving communities’ needs. Building new reservoirs comes with high costs and environmental impacts, alternatively more conservation is both less expensive and more environmentally friendly but can reduce revenues and lead to financial instability for a utility.

“We are trying to remove disincentives for doing the right thing,” says Characklis, who recommends a flexible approach that combines reserve funds, conservation, pricing adjustments, and new forms of financial insurance to protect against losses from extreme events. “There is no silver bullet. It’s a layered solution.”

Gillings researchers have been working with scientists across North Carolina on a major research collaboration that will help state agencies address PFAS, which has been found in state waters. The NC PFAS Testing Network, which includes more than 20 researchers at universities across the state, is collecting and analyzing water samples from municipal drinking water supplies and some private wells, testing atmospheric samples and other sources, such as landfills, to determine PFAS levels.

Members of the Network also are conducting field studies and laboratory experiments to assess potential health effects of exposure in humans, and testing the effectiveness of PFAS removal and remediation methods from commercially available filtration technologies to new materials being developed for removal of PFAS compounds.

This work, which is coordinated through the NC Policy Collaboratory at UNC and funded in 2018 by a $5 million appropriation from the N.C. General Assembly, will help state regulatory agencies create additional guidance and regulations for the well-being of residents. Network researchers have published six research papers so far, with a final report completed in April 2021.

“Our final research report will communicate what we’ve learned from our findings, and from the communities we’ve interacted with, in order to make helpful recommendations in ways we can move the PFAS discussions forward – especially in terms of eliminating or mitigating the amount of PFAS people are exposed to,” said Jason Surratt, PhD, a professor of environmental sciences and engineering at Gillings who is the PFAS Testing Network’s program director.

Wanda Bodnar, PhD, research assistant professor in environmental sciences and engineering, is the Network’s scientific analyst and, along with Surratt, is part of the Network’s project management team. Gillings researchers who are leading research projects as part of the PFAS Testing Network include:

• Orlando Coronell, PhD, associate professor of environmental sciences and engineering, co-leads a team testing the performance of technologies in removing PFAS.‍
• Jackie MacDonald Gibson, PhD, former Gillings professor of environmental sciences and engineering, co-leads a team developing predictive models to predict which private water wells are at greatest risk of PFAS contamination.‍
• Barbara Turpin, PhD, professor and chair of environmental sciences and engineering, co-leads a team examining air emissions to better understand how air particles may impact water on and under the ground.‍
• Rebecca Fry, PhD, the Carol Remmer Angle Distinguished Professor in Children’s Environmental Health and associate chair for strategic initiatives in environmental sciences and engineering, co-leads a team assessing the impact of PFAS on public health.

Wanda Bodnar, PhD, assistant professor of environmental sciences and engineering, discusses the PFAS project in Wilmington, North Carolina, as part of the Tar Heel Bus Tour. Bodnar is the PFAS Testing Network’s Scientific Program Analyst.

PFAS is just one of several Collaboratory projects involving the Gillings School. Since the Collaboratory was created in 2016, it has provided more than $10 million in research funds to Gillings faculty.

“For as long as we’ve been in existence, the Collaboratory has had a productive relationship with the talented academics at the nation’s No. 1 public school of public health,” said NC Policy Collaboratory Executive Director Jeffrey D. Warren, PhD. “It should be no surprise that as soon as the General Assembly directed the Collaboratory to lead its statewide PFAS investigation, we immediately turned to Gillings experts, including Drs. Surratt and Bodnar, to create a project management team to lead the overall effort. Through our long history of Gillings partnerships, we have been able to engage some of the State’s foremost public health and environmental researchers to provide relevant and critical data to undergird major public policy discussions and decisions.”