April 2024

I always liked science and history, and when I was very young I wanted to be an astronomer or an astronaut. But growing up in the mountains, surrounded by rocks, I became interested in the history of the Earth, and first pursued climate history and more recently, the history of environmental contaminants, and the present horrors of human exposures to pollutants.

I am particularly interested in engaging communities to help them identify and overcome environmental challenges that face them. This includes my citizen-science work on lead exposure as well as my public speaking and writing activities revolving around the climate crisis.

For the first topic, I am working to alleviate lead poisoning, a tragic and avoidable harm that often brings a lifetime of cognitive challenges. Lead is present in soils, dust, paint, and water pipes, but we collectively have done a terrible job of identifying lead hotspots in communities and dealing with them. This is where my community science approach comes in—by providing some guidance, participants collect environmental samples which we analyze for free to identity lead and other heavy metals. If values are normal, then they can carry on with their lives, but when we find elevated values, we provide guidance on low-cost mitigation strategies that participants can use to reduce their risk of exposure.

For the second topic, I try to highlight the unjust impacts of climate change and climate-fueled disasters, and place climate change in the geologic context so that people can better understand the forces at play, and can be assured that their individual and collective actions can bend the climate needle to reduce current and future harm. I try to amplify this message by being a frequent media contributor and speaker, and have authored and edited books on the topic.

My impact is due to the timeliness of the topics that I research—lead poisoning and the climate crisis—and to my attempts to explain these issues in terms that everyday people can understand, and thus take action on. The ivory tower (academic institutions) is no place from which to engage society on important and thorny issues—academics are wise to become more public scholars, sharing their ideas and solutions so that they can be incorporated into policy and practice.

I love speaking and writing, as the act of research translation is just so interesting to me. I get the most energy from engaging with students and community members. Oh—and I don’t mind solving geeky technical issues in the lab, either!

Students are involved from start to finish, particularly those who are interested in not just the technical lab stuff but also in working with the community and presenting results. Students inspire some of my own research ideas, and I love to see them “out in the wild” making an impact in the world in small and big ways.

Community members are my primary research partners. Because the issues that I confront in my research have strong community relevance, I rely on the community members themselves to help co-create feasible, place-appropriate, and equitable research plans so that the results are useful and impactful. Several of my current research practices have been informed by input and creativity of community members, including some approaches to soil lead remediation that I am now working with the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) to institute as national best practices!

I am working on a novel “green soil bank” to introduce to Indianapolis, which will be used to mitigate soil lead contaminations, increase green-ness and climate resilience of the city, fight environmental injustice, and train new generations in the green circular economy.  I am also looking into writing another book on chemistry and climate. I have too many possible ideas at the moment, so I need to whittle them down. And of course, I still actively recruit and train students, who are the engines in my research machine!