Collaborations with Brown University, Bradley Hospital target
environmental and behavioral health issues
EDITOR’S NOTE: Federal funding for environmental health research is gravely imperiled by Trump’s newly submitted budget. That budget takes a meat cleaver to the EPA and to science research.
Pilot Projects involving researchers at the University of Rhode Island have been awarded federal funding through Advance Clinical and Translational Research (Advance-CTR), a statewide effort to support clinical research that can be translated into approaches and policies that improve the health of Rhode Islanders.
Marcella Thompson,
assistant professor in the College of Nursing/Academic Health Collaborative,
and Kunal Mankodiya, assistant professor in the College of Engineering, along
with colleagues at Brown University and Bradley Hospital, will each receive
one-year grants of $75,000 through Advance-CTR’s initial round of funding.
Thompson and
co-principal investigator Dinalyn Spears of the Narragansett Indian Tribe are
collaborating with Elizabeth Hoover, Gregory Wellenius and Alison Field of
Brown University to examine exposure to PCBs and mercury among members of the
tribe, whose traditional diet includes locally caught fish.
The project, “Community-Engaged Tribal Research to Assess Dietary Exposures to Mercury and PCBs,” will send trained tribal members into their community to collect data on eating habits and the rate of local fish consumption.
The analyses and
survey findings will provide the community with information needed to weigh the
benefits and risks of eating local fish.
“This is just one
phase of our community engaged research with the tribe on a complex
environmental health issue,” Thompson said of the project.
Advance-CTR (Award
#U54GM115677) is a statewide program funded by the National Institute of
General Medical Science/National Institutes of Health to support clinical and
translational researchers in Rhode Island through funding, research resources
and services, and professional development. It seeks to support research across
the translational science spectrum, including basic science, clinical and
public health.