Featured Scholar: Gabriel Filippelli, Ph.D.
Chancellor’s Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences
Executive Director of the Indiana University Environmental Resilience Institute
Research Video : https://youtu.be/o-eMsLhL4zQ
Building Environmental Optimism from the Ground Up
Gabriel Filippelli, Ph.D., is interested in engaging communities to help them identify and overcome environmental challenges that face them. This includes his citizen-science work on lead exposure as well as his public speaking and writing activities revolving around the climate crisis.
Dr. Filippelli is working to alleviate lead poisoning, a tragic and avoidable harm that often brings 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 Dr. Filippelli's community science approach comes in—by providing some guidance, participants collect environmental samples which are analyzed for free to identity lead and other heavy metals. If values are normal, then they can carry on with their lives, but when elevated values are found, Dr. Filippelli and his research team provide guidance on low-cost mitigation strategies that participants can use to reduce their risk of exposure.
Dr. Filippelli also highlights the unjust impacts of climate change and climate-fueled disasters, and places 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. Dr. Filippelli tries to amplify this message by being a frequent media contributor and speaker, and has authored and edited several books on the topic. Dr. Filippelli's work to improve the health of communities and the climate is another excellent example of how IU Indianapolis's faculty members are TRANSLATING their RESEARCH INTO PRACTICE.
Selected Publications in IU Indianapolis ScholarWorks
With many scholarly articles contributed to IU Indianapolis's free, open access repository, Dr. Filippelli has made research knowledge available to researchers, students, and readers around the world.
Dietrich M, Filippelli GM. Positive outcomes from U.S. lead regulations, continued challenges, and lessons learned for regulating emerging contaminants. Environ Sci Pollut Res Int. 2023;30(19):57178-57187. https://hdl.handle.net/1805/39098
Orr I, Mazari K, Shukle JT, Li R, Filippelli GM. The impact of combined sewer outflows on urban water quality: Spatio-temporal patterns of fecal coliform in indianapolis. Environ Pollut. 2023;327:121531. https://hdl.handle.net/1805/39100
Dietrich M, Wood LR, Shukle JT, Herrmann A, Filippelli GM. Contributory science reveals insights into metal pollution trends across different households and environmental media. Environ Res Lett. 2023;18(3):034013. https://hdl.handle.net/1805/38508
Filippelli GM, Cowie GL (2017) Carbon and Phosphorus Cycling in Arabian Sea Sediments across the Oxygen Minimum Zone. J Oceanogr Mar Res 5: 171. https://hdl.handle.net/1805/38534
Flores JA, Filippelli GM, Sierro FJ, Latimer J. The "white ocean" hypothesis: a late pleistocene southern ocean governed by coccolithophores and driven by phosphorus. Front Microbiol. 2012;3:233. Published 2012 Jul 2. https://hdl.handle.net/1805/38643
Filippelli GM, Flores JA. From the warm Pliocene to the cold Pleistocene: A tale of two oceans. Geology. 2009;37(10):959-960. https://hdl.handle.net/1805/38645
Filippelli GM, Risch M, Laidlaw MAS, Nichols DE, Crewe J. Geochemical legacies and the future health of cities: A tale of two neurotoxins in urban soils. Blum JD, Long D, eds. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene. https://hdl.handle.net/1805/38644
Hayhow C, Brabander DJ, Jim, Rebecca, Lively, Martin, Filippelli G. “We have been the ladder and held the ladder”: Evolving GeoHealth models for actionable, community-engaged research. https://hdl.handle.net/1805/38532
Filippelli G, Taylor M, Entwistle J, Frix E. Exploring the Interior Exposome Using Citizen Science: Initial Results From the New DustSafe Initiative. https://hdl.handle.net/1805/38533
Find more free articles in IU Indianapolis ScholarWorks.