Excellence in Baltimore Public Health Practice Award 2026
Congratulations to our SBCLT friends and partners who have been awarded the Excellence in Baltimore Public Health Practice award by the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University! This recognition was awarded in collaboration with JHU SOURCE, the Community Engagement and Service-Learning Center for the JHU Schools of Public Health, Nursing, and Medicine.
The team that won the prize is composed of:
- Matthew A. Aubourg, MSPH — BSPH Title and Affiliation: PhD Candidate; Center for a Livable Future Lerner Fellow, Steve Wing track, Department of Environmental Health and Engineering
- Lauren Deanes, PhD — BSPH Title and Affiliation: Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Environmental Health and Engineering
- Abhirup Datta, PhD, MStat — BSPH Title and Affiliation: Professor, Department of Biostatistics
- Christopher D. Heaney, PhD, MS — BSPH Title and Affiliation: Associate Professor, Department of Environmental Health and Engineering, Department of Epidemiology (joint), Department of International Health (joint)
Together, this team worked with SBCLT to execute their project: Community-Engaged Investigation of Coal Dust and Air Pollution Burden in Curtis Bay, Baltimore
The team joined with SBCLT and Curtis Bay residents to deploy innovative sensor technology and statistical methods to provide evidence that elevated air pollution in Curtis Bay is associated with activities at the CSX coal terminal. The findings of these methods have informed our environmental justice strategy to push for stronger regulations and policies that protect the health of South Baltimore.
Our partnership with this award-winning team of public health researchers have resulted in the following papers so far:
- Community-driven research and capacity building to address environmental justice concerns with industrial air pollution in Curtis Bay, South Baltimore. Frontiers in Epidemiology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fepid.2023.1198321.
- Use of electron microscopy to determine presence of coal dust in a neighborhood bordering an open-air coal terminal in Curtis Bay, Baltimore, Maryland, USA. Science of the Total Environment. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.176842.
- Relation of wind direction and coal terminal activity patterns with air pollution burden in a community bordering a coal export terminal, Curtis Bay, Maryland, USA. Air Quality, Atmosphere, and Health. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11869-025-01773-w.
- Mobile laboratory measurements of air pollutants in Baltimore, MD elucidate issues of environmental justice. Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association. https://doi.org/10.1080/10962247.2024.2393178.
By training citizen scientists and leaning into community-led, community-owned research, we are able to reclaim control of our own narratives and strengthen our fight for environmental justice with evidence-based findings on environmental health outcomes and the cumulative impacts of overlapping environmental stressors. We are grateful to these public health researchers and experts who have mentored and supported us in this process!
