Pacific Northwest Center for Translational Environmental Health Research

Dr. Emily Ho's research interests are in the area of antioxidants and gene expression and dietary chemoprevention strategies. She is the leader of the EHSC Translational Research Support Core, Directory of the Linus Pauling Institute, and Co-Director of the Center for Healthy Aging Research.

Dr. Diana Rohlman studies the role of environmental health literacy in helping communities better frame and respond to environmental health hazards. She is the leader of the EHSC Community Engagement Core and co-leader of the SRC Community Engagment Core, where she is working to bring researchers and impacted communities together on collaborative projects.

Buildings have far-reaching impacts on public health and well-being. Buildings are the largest energy use sector and they have had the least improvement in their energy efficiency compared to other sectors. Therefore, they are responsible for the majority of the emissions, and at the same time, they also present a great opportunity in reducing energy consumption and emissions by making buildings more energy efficient. Buildings are also where people spend about 90% of their lifetime.
The indoor environment affects people’s health and well-being, performance, and productivity. Therefore, it is critical to have buildings that are high-performing and also healthy and resilient.
In this presentation, Dr. Salimifard will share her academic career journey as well as some of her research projects focusing on the connections between indoor air quality, building energy performance, emissions footprint of buildings and their climate impacts, and public health impacts of buildings, and how to leverage building science to design and operate buildings that are sustainable, healthy, and resilient.

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are a class of environmental contaminants associated with carcinogenic, mutagenic, and teratogenic health effects. Bioremediation is an attractive option for PAH remediation due to its low cost and low energy requirements, however bioremediation can lead to the formation of toxic PAH transformation products. In pursuit of novel bioremediation strategies, exploratory work was conducted with the pure bacterial culture Rhodococcus rhodochrous ATCC 21198 and monoaromatic hydrocarbons (BTEX), which provided the foundation for PAH bioremediation strategies. PAH bioremediation studies required monitoring methods that could provide results in real-time, which traditional analytical techniques could not provide. Thus, a method for rapid analysis of PAHs in aqueous samples was developed using excitation-emission matrix (EEM) fluorescent spectroscopy and parallel factor analysis (PARAFAC) that eliminated the need for extensive sample preparation and separation techniques before analysis. This work also inspired additional method development endeavors for a more complex biological system: embryonic zebrafish. Following the foundational microbial work and method development research phases, our work in PAH remediation technologies has commenced and expanded to include surfactants and immobilized cells for combined remediation strategies. Metrics for remediation success included reduction of parent PAH concentrations, accumulation of PAH metabolites, and overall toxicity of the treated material. Outcomes of this research has demonstrated the utility of 21198 as a candidate for aromatic hydrocarbon bioremediation, provided a new tool for monitoring aqueous PAH concentrations in biological systems, and highlighted the importance of toxicity considerations in PAH remediation efforts.