Giving a virtual talk next Tues w/ the Swetland Ctr for Environmental Health! I'll focus on: 1) US water systems + the communities they serve, 2) barriers to advancements in water treatment processes, and 3) data availability to advance the field and its impact.🚰 🏙️ Register: shorturl.at/93E6a

The Trump administration just skirted normal channels for hiring directors of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences—during a hiring freeze—to appoint a scientist who calls JD Vance one of his “closest friends.”

Months before catastrophic floods swept through an Alaska Native village on Sunday, the Trump administration canceled a $20 million grant meant to protect the community from extreme flooding. At the time, the EPA administrator said he was eliminating "wasteful DEI and Environmental Justice grants."

Did we MAHA yet?

Sharing our new perspective piece in WIREs Water. We propose a publicly accessible + unified drinking #water quality (DWQ) database to address exposure disparities even as fed support vanishes: doi.org/10.1002/wat2... Goal: unify DWQ + infrastructure + demographic data w/ new data vis tools🚰 📊 🗺️

Co-convening a session at the @agu.org meeting this Dec: "Harnessing Geospatial Data to Address Drinking Water Exposures and Public Health Impacts" 🚰🗺️ Welcoming topics @ intersections of hydrology, contaminant modeling, exposure, env justice, & health: bit.ly/4nFJ40M (July 30 ⏰)

Continuing my monthly, dedicated time for paper-reading + hope posting will keep me honest. Goal: mix of fun + purpose w/ notetaking. - Hernán 2010: The Hazards of Hazard Ratios (a reread!) - Statmen-Weil 2020: Disparities in Community Water System Compliance with the Safe Drinking Water Act

We need a story that reminds us our lives are stitched to the soil, the air, and the water—that every breath, every bite, every sip binds us to the earth and to one another.

Major decision today regarding NIH funding, with some fairly scathing comments from Judge Young about the government’s anti-DEI bent. How have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?” Our full story:

The sense of relief, vindication, & hope in the courtroom was undeniable—the emotion was so thick you could feel it in the air as justice & the value of our research were finally affirmed

Was so happy to speak with the @ilinseagrant.bsky.social and the Sea Grant community last month! 🚰 Disparities in Contamination by PFAS in US Community Water Systems Top line: EJ research & action will continue even as federal momentum shifts to oppose it! youtu.be/m6GJWwxNNvE?...

EPA stated plans to backslide on its finalized #PFAS drinking water regs. I'm highlighting some problems with this (w/ graphs!) from my own research 🚰 1st: some replacement PFAS (incl. some they are reneging on) are more freq detected than the "legacy" PFOA & PFOS. This is based on EPA's own data!

As the EPA attempts to backslide on important regulations for several replacement PFAS, let's not forget what the data coming out of the EPA currently show: Several replacement PFAS are more frequently detected in drinking water than their legacy counterparts (PFOS and PFOA).

This is a really beautiful tool for conveying impact. Print them out as posters and flyer your town with them! silencedsciencestories.com/the-scientists

Fun (and sampling) at Cambridge Water Department today 🚰💧 Beyond the facility and staff, I'm also really amazed by all the art in the building - check out the floors in the lobby, which depict all of the water mains of the city.

For #TidyTuesday this week, we're looking at data on terminations of NSF grants 📊 🎨 Using colour to highlight one category 📈 Transparency to highlight the important data ✍️ Annotations instead of a legend for transparency #RStats #ggplot2 #DataViz

Powerful graphic. In a single day on April 25, a DOGE-fueled NSF canceled 340,226 future days of research. Or 932 years. [And that’s just one of three rounds of terminations so far.]

Continuing my monthly, dedicated time for paper-reading + hope posting will keep me honest. Goal: mix of fun + practicality w/ notetaking. - Schwartz 2000: The Distributed Lag between Air Pollution & Daily Deaths - Mahmood 2024: Multiple Data Imputation Methods Advance Risk Analysis... (1/2)

Sharing a favorite poem of mine for Earth Day 🌍 "Riders on Earth Together, Brothers in Eternal Cold" by Archibald MacLeish Originally written to commemorate the first manned orbit around the Moon youtu.be/QaG-EJ7RyEU?...

A great month for books on environmental health topics! Plus another book out next month on PFAS!

May be speaking to the void here, but anyone in the #RStats world having trouble with #tidycensus API calls? I'm currently getting errors, but (seemingly) only when trying to also get feature geometries. I know there were some outages earlier this year...hoping it's not that again 😨

Escaping some doom + gloom by devoting more time each month to reading papers front to back (something I did periodically during my PhD, but hoping to do more now!). The goal is a mix of reading for fun + more immediate practicality w/ note-taking. This week's docket (1/5)

This is awful and will undermine #EPA's ability to protect public health and the environment. Just in the field of #PFAS, much of what we know about the range of PFAS compounds in our environment and the extent of PFAS contamination was uncovered by the extraordinary work of EPA scientists.

Devastating. One snippet of what #EPA ORD has accomplished in just the last year: create the most comprehensive map of US water system service area boundaries to date. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/c...

I'm happy to announce version 4.0 of the PFAS statewide sampling dataset is available online! Key updates: add'l state data and more detailed documentation of analytes Sample data + metadata are available below - feel free to contact me for full version! dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtm...

#BlackHistoryMonth: It's time for this "Dumping in Dixie" (title of a book I wrote in 1990) to end and we bury #environmentalracism forever! PFAS burden: Wisconsin ships toxic foam to Alabama Black Belt wisconsinwatch.org/2023/10/wisc... @wisconsinwatch @BullardCenter

🦋 a professional update: I defended my PhD! 🦋 It's a weird time to be doing so but I'm looking for positions in the environmental health space fit w/ my expertise + expand my own. My expertise: applying quant methods to tackle #drinkingwater + #publichealth + #PFAS + #environmentaljustice issues

California's Proposition 65 law is prompting companies to reformulate products by increasing awareness of harmful chemicals, leading to safer products and reduced consumer risk. doi.org/g84stg

Environmental Justice pages down. No surprise--just witnessing

Public water systems with more Hispanic and Black customers were more likely to have these unregulated industrial contaminants and to be close to pollution sources. This study reminds us to take a broad look at our drinking water—beyond regulated contaminants.

Our new Silent Spring Institute paper in Environmental Health Perspectives found that nearly a third of people in the U.S. have been exposed to unregulated contaminants in their drinking water that could impact their health. ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/... with @jahredwithanh.bsky.social

💧 Unregulated Contaminants in Water Over 97 million US residents are now exposed to unregulated contaminants like PFAS in public water systems, disproportionately affecting Hispanic & Black communities. A stark example of systemic environmental inequities. 🔗 doi.org/10.1289/EHP1... #SciComm 🧪

Another quick #TidyTuesday - a wordcloud of all words used more than once in posit::conf(2024) talk titles As a newbie (read: complete newbie) to tidytext, it was a small treat learning about the 'stop_words' dataset Code: github.com/jliddie-clou...

This is my first #TidyTuesday in almost two years~ Since it's BYOD (bring your own data) week, I decided to recreate a (very easy) data portrait by W.E.B. Du Bois. Code: github.com/jliddie-clou...

The EPA has urged farmers to use sewage sludge as fertilizer, but was warned decades ago that the sludge carried toxic “forever chemicals” that have been linked to causing birth defects, cancer and more.

Also sharing a recently published dialogue in the Env Law Reporter from a panel I took part in earlier this year on the #environmentaljustice implications of #PFAS contamination 🌍⚖️ There's a paywall ⬇️ but happy to share the full dialogue by email if you're interested! www.elr.info/articles/elr...

Happy holidays🎄 🕎 🌙 Required viewing:

Sharing our recent study (www.nature.com/articles/s41...), in which we found: - positive, area-level associations b/w #PFAS contaminated drinking water and #COVID19 mortality w/in 1st yr of pandemic - results consistent across 2 datasets w/ varied geography + robust to many sensitivity analyses

Blue sky, circle dog

Have grown skeptical of social media, but figured I would give this a try! Current PhD student (+ looking for jobs!) at Harvard in Pop Health Sciences - interests in #environmentalhealth, #justice, and #water quality 💧