At the start of the 2023 academic year, UC Irvine Public Health welcomed Jason Douglas, PhD, vice chair and associate professor of Health, Society, and Behavior, to our Program. Dr. Douglas, or commonly referred to as Dr. J by his community partners, joins UCI from Chapman University where for the past five years he has built inroads with historically marginalized communities to address social and environmental determinants impacting their health and well-being.
Dr. J was also part of the UCI Black Thriving Initiative Faculty Cluster Hire, a campus wide initiative that aims to promote environmental justice and health equity in Southern California’s Black communities.
The power of community-based participatory research
“Community-based participatory research is not just a methodology; it’s a philosophy that recognizes the profound value of collaboration and community empowerment,” Dr. J said. “It transforms research from an insulated, disconnected endeavor into a dynamic, reciprocal relationship between researchers and the communities they serve.”
Dr. J’s research is a testament to this philosophy as best described by his current National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) funded project to harness NASA data and affected residents’ spatial knowledge to advance environmental justice in Los Angeles, California.
From its conception, Dr. J partnered with Communities for a Better Environment, a community-based organization that has worked with California communities to advance equity and environmental justice for over 40 years, to build the grant proposal and set specific aims with community input to ensure the authenticity, relevance, and impact of the research.
It is so powerful to train and empower our next generation to advocate for their health. I’m looking forward to mentoring and partnering with not only UCI Public Health students but also with the Orange County community.”
– Jason Douglas, PhD
The research uses NASA-derived remote sensing data of the earth’s surface and compares it against participants’ experiences of environmental health disparities to identify the primary locations of community exposure to life-threatening urban heat islands and air pollution. Using a combined qualitative and quantitative data collection method, Dr. J and his team held participatory mapping sessions in the community to collect real experiences from impacted communities to provide a better understanding of the true impact of environmental exposure to heat and air pollution.
This data along with stories of real people will be a powerful tool, not only for public health practitioners to create interventions and advocate for policy change, but also for communities themselves to become empowered with the knowledge to change their lives.
Training the next generation of the public health workforce
“Youth possess invaluable insights into their own realities, issues, and challenges. By actively involving them in research initiatives, we empower our next generation to drive change from within,” Dr. J explained. “This empowerment extends beyond research projects during their high school and college years but leads to increased community capacity and self-determination in their future professions.”
A key component of Dr. J’s NASA-funded research is the establishment of the Research Leadership Academy comprised of youth and young adult residents in the community. The participatory mapping sessions were led by trained Academy members who will work with Dr. J to develop a web-based, geographic information system-enabled dashboard to illustrate their data and results. The goal is that the system becomes an easy-to-understand dashboard showing the results of the project, which is a community-derived map of environmental hazards backed by satellite images from NASA.
Even beyond this research project, one of the Academy leaders took the initiative to secure funding to repaint their school’s blacktop and plant more native California species to reduce the overall surface temperature for the students and teachers.
“I’m honored to be a part of UCI’s Black Thriving Initiative Faculty Cluster Hire on Environmental Health Disparities and to also see this Program become a School of Population and Public Health. It’s exciting to be at UCI Public Health at such a pivotal time,” Dr. J said. “It is so powerful to train and empower our next generation to advocate for their health. I’m looking forward to mentoring and partnering with not only UCI Public Health students but also with the Orange County community.”
