Our Projects

We are a research-based team consisting of several projects and teams. Our main focus is environmental health including home, work, recreational, and natural environments. We also respond to community concerns and needs as they come up. Please find some summary infographics linked below bringing together our studies up to 2019.

If you would like to learn more about what we do or would like to get involved,

Translation and Transcription Team

This team supports all other research efforts by keeping our project bilingual in the community and by helping us to document audio recording data. As much as our resources allow, our team uses simultaneous translation in townhalls and public venues, provides translators for community health festivals and events, and provides all materials in English and Spanish.

Environmental Health Project

Our primary research focus is environmental health with special interest in preventing exposures to carcinogens.
We use environmental and household sampling techniques to directly measure exposures in communities.
We use CalPIP pesticide application data to explore patterns based on season, target crop, and pesticide toxicity. We also use advanced mapping techniques to determine distribution of application within the community. Our future work will include fate-and-transport modeling to figure out how pesticides move through the air and water to neighboring homes and natural areas like the Sacramento River. Our goal is to work with local farmers and agricultural researchers to reduce runoff in the water and encourage pesticide application strategies that reduce drift in the wind.

We also take community perspectives and expertise seriously. We take a historical perspective on exposure to think about pollution that may be lingering in the environment. We value the knowledge of community members as experts on their own exposures and consider the residents of Knights Landing the first source of information about the environment. Our scientific techniques are guided by this local knowledge and are used to answer lingering questions in the community that have not been documented elsewhere. Knights Landing is moving forward into solutions since many of our research findings are not a surprise to the folks that live in the community.
We are also working to ensure that Knights Landing has access to clean water. The volunteer-led Knights Landing Community Service District has heroically restored the 2 out of 3 wells that were lost during the drought in 2015. Additionally, the public water system is kept safe by this operator. Our project is working to support this effort by focusing on private water wells used for drinking in the migrant labor camp, trailer homes, and ranch houses just outside of the town. These private wells are not regulated or monitored for safety by the government.

Mental and Emotional Health Project

Members of the Knights Landing community came to our team with concerns about a lack of access to mental/emotional health resources and addiction treatment services, including smoking cessation. We worked with the KL One Health Center to increase access to smoking cessation materials. Our efforts to secure a culturally humble counselling service for the community have not been successful yet.
Additionally, we are interested in the intersection of mental health and environmental health. We worked with the UC Davis Feminist Research Institute to create a survey and interview strategy to get preliminary information about the mental and emotional health priorities of the community. We found that there are many benefits to living in Knights Landing, but that there is room for improvement through community-led programs with sustainable support.
Youth concerns are a major theme for our interviews with residents of KL and other community leaders. Our broader KL One Health team invests in the KL youth through tutoring and mentoring programs for young people in KL. We hope to expand our connections and resources for young KL residents in our future projects. We are focusing this energy in the garden project and COVID-19 pandemic storytelling.
Another mental/emotional health concern in KL is unstable housing and homelessness. We have some preliminary information about these concerns and are lobbying with local governments to provide resources to address root problems.

Finally, to address the geographic isolation which underlies many challenges for mental/emotional wellbeing in KL, we have partnered with Yolobus to support their pilot Microtransit program, YOUR Ride, which connects KL to the center of the county and to Sacramento public transit. This service has been hugely successful especially for elderly community members that can't drive, young people that need the service to get to school and jobs in the city, individuals that need stable transportation to jobs in the city, and families that don't have constant access to vehicles. All KL resident now have the opportunity to connect with existing county resources in the city.

40 copies of housing_transportation[KL].

Epidemiology (Access to Care) Project

We often partner with MPH students at UC Davis and have a strong partnership with the research team in the Yolo County Public Health Division. We have developed a deep understanding of health concerns and medical services through our own studies and existing public health and hospital health assessments.
We conducted interviews with the top leaders of local hospitals, clinics, and public health departments to understand the challenges of providing medical services to a small, rural community. We also reviewed budget and policy documents from public and hospital health assessments that covered the Knights Landing community. We found that many of these officials would like to see better transportation to central health care facilities and the growth of community health promoters (like our promotora team).
We also documented disparities in access and utilization of health care based on race/ethnicity and income.

Garden Project

Before the KL Envi Health Project started, the KL youth group Pueblo Unido came up with a plan for a community garden, but was halted when they struggled to find access to irrigation water. When we entered the community partnership, our promotoras decided that we should invest our efforts into this tangible benefit for the community, especially since the benefit of our carcinogen exposure research might not be clear in the near term. We formed partnerships with local leaders. We built a team of students with expertise in garden design, construction, and administration. We also secured a patchwork of funding to begin construction. We even started community activities like cooking classes. This effort has now evolved into a full committee within the KL One Health Center.