Integration of the UM-SRP

All components of the UM-SRP will focus on the health effects, sensing, and/or remediation of phthalates. Community engagement effort and research translation will also focus on plastic pollution, including prevention, intervention, and remediation.

Clinical Project 1, with the active participation of the CEC, will evaluate the impact of phthalates on reproductive health of exposed communities. Project 1 will also design studies to assess biomarkers of exposure, which will serve in risk assessment. These studies will be further experimentally evaluated by Project 2 and combined with environmental stressors, such as circadian rhythm disruption. The studies on exposure are possible because Project 3 will develop and provide novel sensing platforms for phthalates and the existing protocols will expand the repertoire of methods used by the RSC. As part of the integration and promotion of community engagement, the CEC will train and enroll community members and high school students in the detection of plastic toxicants by providing them with sensing tools, which will be developed by Project 3. These approaches are modeled from the educational outreach program called “Citizen Science”. The tools will be field-deployable and easy-to-use. By actively engaging community members in this research and participation in science, the program will serve as a frontline mechanism for research and community engagement.

A key strength of the proposed collaborative research is the integration of expertise in methodology and theory-based experimental research with real-world knowledge and experience through the engagement and translational activities directly with exposed communities. This approach enables us to undertake a more comprehensive and coordinated response to public health issues than either group could achieve on its own. All research findings will have translation values and will be communicated back to the communities and legislature. We have a history of successful interactions with the State legislature on influencing the legislature to help protect occupational exposure to environmental toxicants by creating State-wide mandates to include HEPA filters in the fire stations and the use of the PER and we will take advantage of this experience in our proposed Superfund project. We also have very successful interactions with the government environmental agencies, such as NOAA and US EPA. Several members of the UM-SRP team (namely, Drs. Daunert, Deo, Bachas, and Toborek) have been involved in evaluating environmental exposure to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in Guánica Bay, Puerto Rico (23). Through efforts as ours, the US EPA added the Ochoa Fertilizer Co. Superfund site to the National Priorities List in September 2022. Moreover, the US EPA reached an agreement in March 2023 with Guánica-Caribe Land Development Corporation to remove soil contaminated with PCBs from 19 residential and commercial properties that are part of the Ochoa Fertilizer Co. Superfund site.

Training and mentoring are integral to the scientific and mission aims of UM-SRP. All projects and cores will share personnel resources and will engage the trainees from the RETCC in their activities. While trainees will be financially supported by individual Projects and Cores, they will closely interact with each other via the RETCC. The RETCC will ensure efficient interaction by engaging students in individual projects, and via student participation in scientific and national SRP meetings, seminar series, and an annual UM-SRP Day. The RETCC will make a particular effort to bring together students from different backgrounds, who work both on the biomedical research projects and the environmental science and engineering projects. The diverse research proposed provides a unique opportunity to train the next generation of scientists to think across multiple disciplines and work alongside students from different backgrounds. We anticipate that students who can tackle this research challenge will need to be trained in biomedical and non-biomedical sciences, as well as social, cultural, scientific, and ethical aspects of environmental research. We will also offer the students workshops on entrepreneurship. The RETCC will introduce a number of environmental courses and workshops and will award a Certificate in Environmental Science to trainees who successfully complete the program. The trainees will have an opportunity to convey the results to the general public and policy makers. The trainees will also work very closely with the communities, especially with K-12 students, and provide monitoring and help with research projects, including participation in science fairs, which result from the involvement of participatory research.

Other critical instruments of integration are the four Cores. The ART Core will provide administrative infrastructure for the facilitation and coordination of all planned activities, while fostering and stimulating interdisciplinary research and cross-project/core activities. An important integration activity managed by the ART Core in collaboration with the RETCC will be the dissemination of information and discoveries via Social Media, educational materials, the seminar series, and the UM-SRP Day. The ART Core, via its Research Translational Team, will also facilitate communication between the UM-SRP and the greater SRP community, foster partnerships and cooperation with government agencies, identify opportunities and mechanisms for technology and knowledge transfers, and disseminate valuable information to others, including news media, the general public, and policy makers. Working closely with the CEC, the ART Core will help to translate the new knowledge generated by the UM-SRP to SRP stakeholders and the targeted audience, including communities living near contaminated sites.

Integration via the CEC and RETCC was described above. The critical element of integration will be through the DMAC, which will provide the members of the Center with support for effective data management and data analysis. The DMAC will create metadata and ontology that describe the data genesis, the attributes and their values, and the relations among the attributes. The Core will ensure that each dataset will be formatted in a consistent manner. The Core will provide a visual environment for integration of all data residing in the UM-SRP. Datasets with common IDs for the data elements (e.g., the sensor data, which has multiple components including the activity data, the health data, and the exposure data) are natural candidates for integration. In consultation with the Project Leaders, each data set will be made available for access by members of other projects, while the DMAC will control the access privileges. 

The RSC will integrate individual components of UM-SRP by providing a central facility that performs analytical and quantitative services to detect phthalates in environmental and biological samples. The RSC will also integrate components by testing the outputs of the sensors for phthalates developed by Project 3. These services are invaluable for the overall success of our program and will be useful for all research projects. By working closely with the RETCC, the RSC will provide training opportunities for students in state-of-the art methodologies and advancements toward translational environmental research.

The integration of the UM-SRP is further supported and highlighted by robust collaborations among the individual investigators. Drs. Daunert, Bachas, Deo, Kobetz, Knecht, and Toborek have worked in a team for a number of years and have jointly mentored students, published a large number of papers together, have joint patents, and have been co-PIs in many funded research grants. One of them is through the University of Miami Laboratory for Integrative Knowledge (U-LINK), which provided funds to facilitate collaboration and obtain preliminary data for the current UM-SRP application. The grant was awarded to Drs. Daunert and Toborek (MPIs) and involves UM-SRP investigators. Drs. Daunert, Deo, and Toborek were also investigators in a grant titled “Environmental PCB Redistribution and Community Exposure after Hurricane Maria” that was funded by the NIEHS through an R21 grant mechanism.

Drs. Bachas, Daunert, Deo, Knecht, Kobetz, and Toborek are members of the Dr. JT McDonald Biomedical Nanotechnology Institute, BioNiUM. Dr. Daunert is the Director, Dr. Knecht is Associate Director, and Dr. Deo is the Educational Initiatives Director of the BioNiUM. Drs. Daunert, Knecht, and Bachas, along with Dr. Deo, have established through the years a series of outreach and K-12 engagement activities. Moreover, Drs. Knecht and Daunert have established a Research Experiences for Undergraduate (REU) Program funded by the NSF; the program focuses on training students from underrepresented groups in research and guiding them to pursue graduate degrees and research careers in biomedical sciences. As a team, we are also working with the community and have trained students from local high schools in using our paper-based field sensors to test for a series of Superfund chemicals, including PCBs. 

Drs. Kobetz, Caban-Martínez, Bachas, Deo, and Daunert are engaged in a common project on the environmental monitoring of toxic volatile organic compounds that firefighters are exposed to. This collaborative research has been ongoing for the past eight years and has resulted in a number of important discoveries and initiatives and awards at  the State and national levels. One of them was the discovery of the presence of Superfund carcinogenic compounds, like PAHs, in fire stations, including in their ice makers. This puts the firefighters at elevated risk for cancer, even when not in action. This important finding was effectively communicated to the Florida firefighter community and resulted in changes in the State legislature. 

Drs. Daunert, Deo, and Paidas have a history of collaboration with joint mentoring of Obstetrics and Gynecology Medical Fellows in oncology, fertility, and environmental health. Further, this team has joint grants, publications, and patents. Drs. Deo, Daunert, and Jayaweera have collaborated for years and have the track record of funding, publications, mentoring of graduate students, and of organizing international conferences. Similarly, Drs. Toborek and Jayaweera have worked and published together. Drs. Kulandavelu and Paidas have been working together and are Co-Investigators on grant proposals. Drs. Ogihara, Mader and Norris have a history of collaborative research that has led to publications in biological ontologies and digital humanities research grants from the Sloan Foundation. 

Drs. Deo, Daunert, and Mr. Ali Habashi, an award-winning filmmaker and faculty member of the UM’s Department of Cinema and Interactive Media in the School of Communication, jointly developed a course, BMB710: Making Digital Science Film, to teach students conceptualization and documentation of research. Students generated digital media clips/videos utilizing state-of-the-art techniques and equipment and learned to effectively disseminate science and technology. We plan to continue training our students in communication. It is important to highlight that several of our students’ films obtained recognition and were highlighted by the NIH. Notably, one of our students received a prestigious award at the Tribeca Film Festival for their inspirational film on their journey to become independent scientists through their environmental health research in our laboratories. Thus, our collaborative work and combined data gathered in this project also strengthen the scientific premise and integration behind the central hypothesis of our UM-SRP proposal.