Superfund Research Program (SRP) staff and grantees are committed to advancing research by presenting innovative findings, tools, and technologies to stakeholders in academia, government, and communities.

SRP Director, Bill Suk, Ph.D., and SRP Health Specialist, Brittany Trottier, M.P.H., collaborated with several SRP grantees in a recent commentary about the interactions between environmental exposures and COVID-19 on the health of children. The objective was to identify gaps in knowledge about the factors that protect children from severe SARS-Cov-2 infection, even in the face of air pollution, and to develop a transdisciplinary research strategy to address these gaps.

SRP Health Scientist Administrator Michelle Heacock, Ph.D., was named one of NIH's Women in Data Science . She co-leads the Joint Repositories Team, which is helping data repositories align with the FAIR and TRUST principles.

University of Kentucky (UK) SRP Center's Isabel Escobar, Ph.D. and Angela Gutierrez, Ph.D., joined with Orlando Coronell, Ph.D., of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Rainer Lohmann, Ph.D., of the University of Rhode Island, and Slawo Lomnicki, Ph.D., of the Louisiana State University SRP Center to host a symposium at this year's American Chemical Society Annual meeting. The symposium, Innovation in Remediation Strategies and their Impact on Superfund Contaminants, featured key advances, identified pressing challenges, and proposed future directions for contaminant remediation strategies for Superfund contaminants. The session also featured innovative detection and monitoring technologies that help evaluate remediation effectiveness. Suk and SRP Health Specialist Sara Amolegbe, M.S.P.H., shared progress of SRP research during the session as well.

SRP Health Scientist Administrator Heather Henry, Ph.D., participated in the John P. Wyatt, M.D., Environment and Health Symposium during the University of Kentucky's 2021 Earth Day event in April. She served on a panel which discussed strategies to address environmental health disparities at the national, regional, and local levels.

SRP Health Scientist Administrator Danielle Carlin, Ph.D., Trottier, Heacock, Amolegbe, and Suk participated in the virtual 2021 Society of Toxicology (SOT) Meeting .Carlin, who is a past President of the North Carolina SOT Chapter, joined other NIH collaborators to host a specialty section, chair workshops, and help organize the SOT Funding Insights Room where NIEHS grantees and new potential applicants met with NIEHS staff to ask questions about applying for grants.

Duke University SRP Center researcher Heather Stapleton, Ph.D., was featured recently in an NIEHS Partnerships for Environmental Public Education podcast on how dogs might be able to shed light on chemical exposures and disease . Stapleton and another researcher discussed their work using silicone monitoring devices to detect chemical exposures in dogs and their owners to gain insight into the ways our daily exposures may affect our health.

Angela Gutierrez, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher at the UK SRP Center and co-lead on a SRP-funded small business innovative research grant with Bluegrass Advanced Materials, LLC. , was recently featured in a NIEHS Story of Success . The story highlighted her SRP accomplishments including receiving the 2017 Karen Wetterhahn Award and a K.C. Donnelly Externship award in 2016 , and how her UK SRP Center research project led to her small business grant.

A team of transdisciplinary researchers at the Columbia University SRP Center and collaborators spent 20 years developing the Health Effects of Arsenic Longitudinal Study (HEALS) as a landmark research resource . HEALS data has revealed new insight on the link between arsenic and harm to human health and has been translated into meaningful public health benefits.