Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service has supported civically engaged research through the creation of the Tufts Community Research Center. The TCRC seeks to involve Tufts faculty and students from across all seven schools of the university in research done in collaboration with community partners. We place a special, but not exclusive, emphasis on Tufts’ host communities: Somerville, Medford and Chinatown. Research we support must involve a formal community partner and produce scholarship at the same time it yields knowledge useful to the community. Priority is given to redressing issues of disparity, inequality and injustice in society. Research topics may include education, the economy, housing, the environment and health.
2007 Inventory of Community Research
Staff Doug Brugge, Director Bindu Panikkar, Graduate Assistant
Public Programs and Presentations Our community research symposium in spring 2006 was widely judged a success. However, based on discussion with our advisory board we decided not to try to simply replicate the program again in 2007 and instead we are planning on holding a working session in the fall of 2007 that will be designed to help initiate new collaborations between faculty and community partners. A notable recent public presentation was the session that Lydia Lowe of the Chinese Progressive Association, our graduate assistant Bindu Panikkar, and our director, Doug Brugge conducted at the tenth annual conference of the Community Campus Partnerships for Health in Toronto in April, 2007. Our session was on “community research and community organizing” and was attended by about 60 actively engaged conference goers. The conference was a substantial success with 650 attendees, mostly from the US and Canada, but also from many other countries.
This spring TCRC is funding development of a second grant to the NIH Community-Based Participatory Research mechanism led by Chris Economos who is collaborating with Somerville community partners on obesity related concerns. to read an article about this study. In addition, there are several smaller grant proposals in progress. Doug Brugge has a proposal to do another book via a CBPR process with the Navajo people. The proposal scored well at the National Library of Medicine and is being reviewed again following revisions. Bart Laws of the Latin American Health Institute is moving forward on submitting an NIH proposal on HIV, substance abuse and mental health treatment. Doug Brugge has also been asked to be a CBPR expert on several proposals to NIH that were initiated outside of Tufts. TCRC also contributed to the Tufts/T-NEMC CTSA proposal in its required community engagement section. This $40 million proposal to NIH is critical to the research missions of the hospital and medical school. Peggy Newell, Vice Provost for Tufts, has asked the center to work on a health disparities center grant to the National Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities. We started work on this proposal last fall, but stopped when we realized that we needed to wait for a different center grant program announcement that we expect will come out in 2007.
Students There are now at least three Ph.D. students at Tufts doing their theses in projects with community partners, and, in two cases, in a CBPR context. One of them, Jamie deLemos, is working on uranium contamination and health as part of a major NIH funded study based at the University of New Mexico. A second, Chris Rioux, is conducting a secondary analysis of data collected as part of Katy Tucker’s Puerto Rican Health Study at the HNRC. The analysis will investigate effects of highway exposure on markers of cardiac health. A third, Bindu Panikkar, is working with the NIH funded environmental justice study of immigrant occupational health in Somerville that is headed up by David Gute and in partnership with Somerville community organizations.
Publications We have not recently collected community research publications from other faculty, and will do so soon. Community engaged research publications for the past year on which center director Doug Brugge was an author include: Brugge D, Benally T, Yazzie-Lewis E eds. The Navajo People and uranium. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, NM, 2006. Freeman ER, Brugge D, Bennett-Bradley WM, Levy JI, Rivera Carrasco E. Challenges of Conducting Community-Based Participatory Research in Boston’s Neighborhoods to Reduce Disparities in Asthma. Journal of Urban Health: Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 2006, 83:1013-1021. Brugge D, Panikkar B, Snell J, Welker-Hood K. Lessons from Developing Methods to Study the Relationship of Energy and Water Savings to Housing Conditions and Resident Health. Local Environment 2006, 11:701-717. Repace JL, Hyde JN, Brugge D. Air pollution in Boston bars before and after a smoking ban. BMC Public Health 2006, 6:266. Levy JI, Brugge D, Peters JL, Clougherty JE, Saddler S. A community-based participatory research study of the efficacy of multifaceted in-home environmental interventions for pediatric asthmatics in public housing. Social Science & Medicine 2006; 63:2191-2203. Brugge D, Missaghian M. Protecting the Navajo People through tribal regulation of research. Science and Engineering Ethics 2006; 12:491-507. Hyde J, Brugge D, Repace J, Hamlett J, Rand W, and Haley N. Worker Exposure to Environmental Tobacco Smoke in Smoking-Restricted Restaurants and Bars. Ch. 14, In: Passive Smoking and Health Research. ISBN: 1-60021-382-0, Editor: N.A. Jeorgensen. Nova Science Publishers, Inc. 2007:311-321. Bennett A, Depina M, Hickson B, White M, Brugge D, Salas FL, Zotter J, Osgood N-D. to breath or not to breath: A preliminary report on asthma and the environment in Dorchester. Boston Urban Asthma Coalition, Dorchester, MA, 2006. Brugge D, deLemos JL, Bui C. The Sequoyah Fuels Incident and the Church Rock spill: Unheralded nuclear releases in Native American communities. American Journal of Public Health (in press). Lee AC, Brugge D, Phan L, Woodin M. A comparison of knowledge about asthma between Asians and Non-Asians at two pediatric clinics. Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health (in press). Panikkar B, Brugge D. The Ethical issues in uranium mining research in the Navajo Nation. Accountability in Research (in press). Brugge D, Welker-Hood K, Kosheleva A, Saddler S. Association and correlation of self-reported home environmental factors and health symptoms. Archives of Environmental and Occupational Health (in press). Lowe L, Brugge D. Grassroots Organizing in Boston Chinatown: A comparison with CDC-style organizing. Ostrander and Portney eds. New Scholarship on Civic Engagement. University Press of New England (Accepted). Brugge D, Lee AC, Woodin M, Rioux C. Native and foreign born as predictors of pediatric asthma in an Asian immigrant population: A cross sectional survey. Environmental Health: A Global Access Science Source, 2007, 6:13 (2 May 2007).
