Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowships and Supporting Activities: NSF Minority Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship Starter Grant

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This starter-grant is for 2:1 matching (institutional:NSF) for start up equipment costs for a researcher who has completed two years of an NSF post-doctoral fellowship and now has a tenure-track position at San Francisco State University. The equipment costs support an analysis of how social fragmentation, characterized by racial, class, and economic inequality, are related to spatial inequalities in pollution exposures and associated health risks. The research will address the question of how racial and economic segregation relate to disparities in exposures to environmental hazards and associated health impacts among diverse communities and whether communities characterized by high levels of segregation and socioeconomic inequality experience higher levels of environmental health risks overall. These questions will be examined at both the regional and state levels, using the Los Angeles Air Basin and California as a geographic area of analysis. Study results from this research in California will have implications for the development of public health interventions and policy initiatives for community and economic development.Indices of social and racial stratification (such as race, class, and income segregation, rapid demographic change and indicators of economic inequality, such as the Gini coefficient) for regions and counties in California will be derived using variables from the 1990 and 2000 US Census. Using conventional environmental health risk assessment methods, air toxics exposures and health risks indicators will be calculated by combining modeled air toxics concentration estimates with cancer and non-cancer toxicity information. Multivariate regression analysis will be used to assess the relationship between environmental health risks (dependent variables) and social stratification indicators (independent variables) while controlling for important covariates such as population density, land use, political power and civic participation. Furthermore, a theoretical framework will be developed for understanding how inequality diminishes social capital and social cohesion which in turn can increase community vulnerability to the placement of environmental hazards and exposures to pollution.