Innovative approaches to human exposure assessment in environmental justice communities

An innovative human exposure research project is examining environmental exposure by measuring contaminants in selected environmental justice communities. The project is developing the research infrastructure of the NCCU Environmental Science Program and outreach tools for environmental justice communities. The project will begin by selecting a minority and/or economically disadvantaged community that may be impacted by environmental hazards and then assessing the environmental exposures in the minority community. A long-range goal of the project is to develop and validate community-level exposure scenarios that can be adapted to other similar communities. The study community selected for this project must have some data available to anticipate exposure scenarios, have existing community groups or infrastructures to help to provide input and feedback to the researchers, and have sufficient population for recruitment of participants. The study will provide opportunities for state and local partnerships and maximize faculty and student involvement. The study is a complement of physical science and engineering approaches with social science methodologies that are leading to a non-traditional risk assessment and management process.