The Greater Jackson Water Quality Study, Past, Present, and Future

Join HBCU SCI for the fifth event in our 2023 Sustainability & Social Justice series with Dr. Erica Brown, RGSS Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at Brown University’s School of Public Health for an impactful session entitled “The Greater Jackson Water Quality Study, Past, Present, and Future.“

The water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi, has recently made national and international headlines as a major environmental catastrophe. This has had a major impact on residents’ public health and well-being. In this conversation, Dr. Brown will discuss our work to date and share some of her team’s preliminary findings. We will also discuss how the water crisis has impacted public school attendance rates and the implications of these findings. Attendees will be introduced to the Greater Jackson Water Quality Study, a longitudinal public health study examining the environmental impacts that water pollution but additionally noise, air, and soil pollution may have on the health and well-being of the city’s most vulnerable, its children. The session will also discuss the mobile tap water testing laboratory, environmental health literacy toolkit, and other environmental monitoring campaigns currently underway in Jackson. These campaigns include air, noise, soil, and visual pollution measurements.

Erica Brown, PhD
Dr. Brown is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at the Brown University School of Public Health. She has extensive experience with environmental exposure assessments, environmental exposure modeling, community surveying, and community engagement. She also runs the Community Noise Lab at Brown University. The lab’s primary aim is to explore the relationship between community noise and health, holistically, by working directly with communities to support their specified noise issue using real-time monitoring and exposure modeling; the smartphone app, NoiseScore; community noise surveying via the National Environmental Quality Survey; laboratory-based experiments, and community engagement activities.