Reneé Wurth, PROTECT trainee at Northeastern, has been honored with a K.C. Donnelly Externship Award Supplement, which provides funding to Superfund Research Program trainees to expand their research experience at another institution. Wurth will spend her externship at the University of California, Berkeley SRP Center, where she will develop new skills in water quality analysis, model and tool development, and dissemination of information.
Wurth studies the relationship between dietary frequency and urinary phthalate levels among pregnant women in Puerto Rico. She is also working with the Data Management and Modeling Core on preliminary cluster analysis of food frequency data, to look for instances of dietary patterns or clustering.
At UC-Berkeley, Wurth will continue her work in analysis as well as research translation and community outreach projects. In October, she will conduct spatial mapping of water sources and their qualities within the framework of a water disparate community in Southern California. When she returns to UC-Berkeley next winter, she will work with local community groups to learn more about environmental health policy and ways to effectively disseminate data analysis results.
The KC Donnelly Award was created in 2009 to support SRP graduate students and postdoctoral fellows pursuing transdisciplinary research in environmental health. Several PROTECT Trainees have received the award in the past, including most recently Marvic Carmona de Jesus (Project 4) in 2015.
Congratulations, Reneé!