Jennifer Richmond-Bryant

Bio

My research focuses on the assessment of human exposure to air pollution, primarily to understand and address environmental health disparities. Building from my leadership of a U.S. Department of Agriculture National Needs Fellowship focused on providing doctoral students with training in the natural, physical, and social sciences needed for conducting research related to environmental justice, I am coordinating a university-wide effort to create a mechanism for providing technical assistance to communities in need to address challenging problems involving exposure to environmental pollution and access to environmental amenities. Through this approach, our goal is to expand collaborations with communities, increase hands-on training and experience for students and community members, provide our students with real-world research opportunities outside of the classroom, and answer community members’ questions through research-based information. I am a project lead with the Louisiana State University Superfund Research Program, where I have conducted a campaign to assess air pollution and health impacts of emissions from an open burn/open detonation (OBOD) hazardous waste facility in Colfax, LA. Our work was considered by the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality in their decision to ban OBOD as of late December, 2023. Along these lines, my research has explored the transport and dispersion mechanisms leading to spatiotemporal variability in concentrations of particulate matter (PM) and gaseous air pollutants, how such variability influences estimates of human exposure to air pollution, and related implications for understanding disparities in exposure and interpreting epidemiologic study results. I joined the Forestry and Environmental Resources faculty at North Carolina State University in 2019 to use my experience as a federal scientist to inform teaching and research. I served as an exposure assessment subject matter expert for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s National Center for Environmental Assessment from 2008 to 2019, where I authored chapters of the Integrated Science Assessment on exposure assessment and/or atmospheric science for particulate matter, ozone, carbon monoxide, oxides of nitrogen, oxides of sulfur, and lead. Prior to joining the EPA in 2008, I was an Assistant Professor at the City University of New York (CUNY) Urban Public Health program. My work has been published in several high-impact journals, such as Environmental Health Perspectives, Environmental Science and Technology, Atmospheric Environment, and Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology.