# Community Engagement Core

> **NIH NIH P42** · TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY · 2021 · $150,232

## Abstract

Community Engagement Core ABSTRACT
The residents of communities located along the Galveston Bay/Houston Ship Channel (GB/HSC) region have
been documented as having excess risk of exposure to acute pollution, emergency chemical spills and
incidents, and high-impact natural disasters, such as hurricanes and flooding. In addition to their documented
physical and environmental vulnerability, many of the residents of these communities are also socially
vulnerable. Community engagement can provide a link between the adaptive capacities of a community—the
human, fiscal, political, and social resources that enable proactive behavior and the combined strength of local
plans and policies—and its responses and changes after disruptions, including natural disasters and
environmental contamination events. An engaged community has greater resilience and is better able to
anticipate future threats and prepare for and recover from adverse events. The proposed Texas A&M
University Superfund Research Center is focused on mitigating human exposure to hazardous substances,
specifically exposure caused by redistribution of contaminants by manmade or natural environmental disasters.
Recognizing the importance of engaging at-risk communities to effectively decrease the threat of
environmental contaminant events to human health, scholars and practitioners at Texas A&M University
formed the Resilience and Climate Change Cooperative Project, an interdisciplinary engagement project, in
2014, which focuses attention on issues related to the vulnerability and resilience of specific communities to
environmental hazards. The preliminary work of the Project will be extended into the proposed Superfund
Research Center, where we will continue to build adaptive capacity and resilience of communities in the
Galveston Bay/Houston Ship Channel (GB/HSC) area to the threat of exposure to hazardous substances as a
consequence of environmental emergency contamination events. To do this, The Community Engagement
Core, directed by Dr. Jennifer Horney at Texas A&M University School of Public Health, will pursue four
specific community engagement aims: 1) build capacity among community members in the detection,
assessment, and evaluation of the health effects of hazardous substances; 2) develop tools and resources for
community engagement using mobile applications and citizen science; 3) engage community members in
collaborative participatory research aimed at reducing exposure during environmental emergencies; and 4)
determine what factors will improve the adaptive capacity of GB/HSC communities to proactively plan for and
manage future environmental risk linked to both natural and manmade environmental emergency
contamination events. The activities proposed under each Aim are aligned with existing, and well-documented,
stakeholder priorities and build on prior work done with community partners. They will involve community
partners in the design, data collection, and communication of findin...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10137972
- **Project number:** 5P42ES027704-05
- **Recipient organization:** TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** JENNIFER A HORNEY
- **Activity code:** P42 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $150,232
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2017-09-01 → 2022-09-19

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10137972

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10137972, Community Engagement Core (5P42ES027704-05). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10137972. Licensed CC0.

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