From Risk to Resilience: Assessing Adverse Birth Outcome Risks and Adaptive Capacity to Fine Soil Dust and Heat Exposures in California

PROJECT SUMMARY This K01 award will support the career development of Dr. Alexandra Heaney, a climate epidemiologist in the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health at UC San Diego. The candidate’s goal is to become a leader in interdisciplinary research that combines cutting-edge causal inference and statistical modeling with community- based mixed methods research to characterize the health impacts of climate-related environmental hazards and to build community resilience to these hazards. This application proposes linked career development and research activities to fill important gaps in knowledge surrounding the impacts of ambient dust and extreme heat exposure on adverse birth outcomes. Extreme heat is an established risk factor for preterm birth (PTB) and low birth weight (LBW), but knowledge of the impacts of mineral dust—a pollutant becoming more prevalent in the Western US due to climate change—remains limited. Clarification of these environmental factors' individual and combined effects on neonatal outcomes is needed. Further, local-level adaptive capacity is integral to climate resilience, yet little work has investigated the lived experience of adapting to extreme heat or dust exposures, especially among pregnant individuals. This project aims to advance the candidate’s expertise and skills in environmental and perinatal epidemiological methods, dust exposure science, and community engaged research to address these knowledge gaps. The candidate will leverage new modeled concentrations of dust and a cohort of ~6.5 million mother-child pairs from the Study of Outcomes in Mothers and Infants (SOMI) cohort to estimate the effects of dust exposure during pregnancy on PTB and LBW (Aim 1) and quantify the interactive effects of dust and extreme heat exposures on adverse birth outcomes (Aim 2). The candidate will then engage with community partners in Imperial Valley, CA where exposures to dust and heat are particularly high, to examine the perceptions of risk, adaptive behaviors, and adaptation resources used by members of the communities to mitigate the adverse impacts of these environmental hazards. The 3- year plan includes mentorship from four experienced and committed faculty at UCSD with expertise in community engaged and mixed-method research, perinatal epidemiology, and dust science. Two additional mentors—leaders in environmental epidemiology and environmental health policy—will support the candidate. Leadership of the proposed research, along with a training plan involving coursework, and mentored grant writing, will advance the candidate’s training objectives to: 1); build expertise in dust exposure science 2); build expertise in birth outcome research and perinatal and environmental epidemiological methods; 3) train in mixed-method and community engaged research approaches; and 4) strengthen collaborative partnerships and build leadership skills for directing transdisciplinary research projects. UCSD’s commitment to early career scientists; leadership in implementation science, epidemiology, and climate science; and close community partnerships will provide the candidate an outstanding environment to advance her career goals.