A recent study led by Noemi Gavino-Lopez, a UNC SRP trainee and MS candidate in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, highlighted the environmental injustice of toxic metals in private well water in NC. Inspired by the publication of the NCWELL database, which documented high levels of arsenic (As), manganese (Mn), cadmium (Cd)... Read more »
Rebecca Fry, PhD, UNC Superfund Research Program (SRP) director, sparked the curiosity of a group of high school science teachers when she introduced systems biology during a professional development institute in summer 2022. Her presentation, alongside others by additional SRP researchers, helped participating teachers think about how to integrate real world data into their instruction.... Read more »
March 16, 2023 Rebecca Fry’s lab is one of the first to study the effects of prenatal exposure to toxic metals as it relates to the epigenome — she has shown how behaviors and the environment can cause changes that affect the way genes function. She launched the Institute for Environmental Health Solutions and is using funds from the Angle Professorship and the UNC Superfund Research Program, which she directs, to work with North Carolina communities that have contaminated drinking water and provide them with cost-effective filters.
When residents of Stokes County, NC first reached out to the UNC SRP Community Engagement Core (CEC) with questions about their well water, the CEC and SRP investigators launched Well Empowered, a pilot study to assess the presence of toxic metals in private wells used for drinking water. Fast forward several years and after a... Read more »
“It’s so interesting to me that water can be clear and seem fine to drink yet there can actually be things in it that aren’t good for our health,” said Mikayla Armstrong, PhD, who until recently was a UNC SRP trainee in Project 5. Armstrong’s interests led her along a pathway towards the intersection of... Read more »
Over fall break, 20 UNC graduate students, postdocs, and staff members from the Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, the Curriculum in Toxicology, and Environmental Medicine gathered on campus for two days of hands-on training with a real-word dataset. The PRogramming for Environmental HEalth And Toxicology (PREHEAT) Retreat was the result of a collaboration between... Read more »
UNC SRP was well represented at the 61st annual Society of Toxicology (SOT) meeting held earlier this spring in San Diego, CA. “UNC SRP trainees were present in force at this year’s SOT meeting. They presented innovative research including solutions for chemical-induced disease, and novel methods to identify linkages between chemicals and disease in vulnerable... Read more »
A new study from Project 1 resulted in a recent publication exploring the mechanisms connecting inorganic arsenic (iAs) and diabetes. UNC SRP trainee and lead author Jenna Todero’s research is at the interface of environmental exposures, diabetes, and genomics, studying the relationship between chronic exposure to iAs, an environmental toxin recognized as a top priority... Read more »
To better understand this vulnerability, collaborative efforts within the UNC Superfund Research Program by Lauren Eaves, PhD, UNC SRP trainee, Julia Rager, PhD, Data Management and Analysis Core (DMAC) co-leader, Andrew George, PhD, Community Engagement Coordinator, and Rebecca Fry, PhD, UNC SRP Director, resulted in a recent publication and creation of the new publicly available... Read more »
Growing up in a picturesque environment dotted with some of the oldest rocks in Nigeria was inspiring for me as a young boy and motivated my later professional decisions. During my senior year in college, I was introduced to the field of applied geochemistry by my professor when he suggested the prevalence of cancer in... Read more »
