A Winning Approach

Michelle Fanucchi

How long has UC Davis been exploring the effects of air pollution on human health? Here’s one measure: The National Institutes of Health recently renewed a grant for ozone research at UC Davis for the 32nd year. The project’s lead scientist, professor Charlie Plopper, jokes, “It has to be one of the few grants left with a three-digit ID number.” New grants now get numbers in the low five digits.

In fact, it was Plopper, along with Kent Pinkerton, Bill Adams and a handful of other now-senior faculty, who first put UC Davis on the air-and-health map in the 1980s and ’90s with groundbreaking findings about the unrecognized damage done to children’s lungs by ozone and secondhand tobacco smoke. Now they, and the young graduate students and assistant professors they have mentored, are managing the campus’s bulging portfolio of air quality and health studies.

Plopper credits the recent surge in activity to new interdisciplinary partnerships. “UC Davis has always had real strong expertise in the biological aspects of respiratory health—biochemists, cell biologists, pathologists, the full range, from the medical school, the vet school and the ag school—all working together,” he says. “But there was not a lot of mixture of physical scientists and biological scientists. Only recently has that occurred, which I think is just critical. Now is the time for it.”

Much of the credit for that development goes to engineering professor and modeling expert Tony Wexler, who came to Davis from the University of Delaware in 2000 with an interest in the health effects of very small airborne particles. Wexler revived an old mailing list of UC Davis researchers interested in air pollution and convened lunch discussions at the Silo. By 2002, at the urging of Vice Chancellor for Research Barry Klein, Wexler had organized a new research unit, the UC Davis Air Quality Research Center. By 2003, he and Pinkerton had set their sights on winning some of $40 million in grants that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency would award in 2005 for air-quality research. The EPA specifically wanted to know much more about airborne particulate matter and its effects on human health. The answers, the agency emphasized, were to be discovered using “an integrated approach” and offering “the opportunity for investigators from different disciplines to work together.”

Pinkerton and Wexler proposed an ambitious research program that would experiment locally (in the notoriously polluted San Joaquin Valley) and produce results that would apply nationally. The genius of the UC Davis proposal lay in “the mixture” that Plopper describes. The physical scientists and engineers would not just collect and analyze airborne particles; the biologists would not just assess how living tissue responded when the pollutants were inhaled. Their expertise would overlap and magnify. For instance, if biologists identified a particularly toxic airborne particle, the physical side could manufacture a batch of those particles for further study. If physical scientists devised computer models of particle movement in the body’s transport systems (airways and bloodstream), the biologists could focus their attention on sites where particles were most likely to deposit and cause injury.

The UC Davis proposal was up against tough competition. In 2000, the first round of EPA particulate-matter (PM) center funding had gone to Harvard and New York universities, the universities of Rochester and Washington, and UCLA. Now all were running for renewal on their five-year records. But in the end, UC Davis’ innovative and collaborative approach carried the day. The grants to NYU and Washington were not renewed; UC Davis and Johns Hopkins University took their places.

One of the young UC Davis biologists whose work will be supported by the PM center grant is Michelle Fanucchi, who studies childhood lung development with Pinkerton and Plopper. Fanucchi was involved in the development of the PM center proposal and calls its collaborative spirit “amazing.”

“At the beginning, I told [associate professor of engineering] Mike Kleeman, ‘You have to talk to me like I’m a sixth-grader.’ They have 16 words for carbon!” Fanucchi says. “At the same time, the engineers have a lot to learn from the biologists. It’s been very challenging but very fun. And now we are uniquely set up to finally make advances in understanding how particulates affect health.”

Related stories:

A Toll on Human Health
UC Davis researchers have made major contributions to understanding how airborne environmental toxins (such as smoke, dust and vehicle emissions) affect human health, particularly children’s health. One of their most troubling findings: Contrary to common belief, very young children’s lungs are more susceptible than adults’ to injury by environmental toxins, and those injuries cause significant deformities in essential airways that may be permanent. [more]

From Labs to Law Books
Discoveries by university researchers don’t die after they are described in doctoral theses and published in science journals. They live on in public service, by informing the actions of policymakers and legislators. The laws that govern automobile owners, electricity providers, tomato processors, oil refineries, construction-site managers and even dry cleaners rely on scientific facts supplied by air-quality experts at UC Davis and elsewhere. [more]

Climate-Altering Effects
UC Davis scientists are looking for players in global climate change in unusual places: seashores, dead plankton and pine trees. [more]

Air Profiles: The researchers, the questions their asking and the answers they're finding. [more]

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Links to more information:

Air Quality Research Center

John Muir Institute of the Environment

Institute of Transportation Studies

UC Davis–Caltrans Air Quality Project

Atmospheric Aerosols & Health program for graduate students

Stories and photos by Sylvia Wright, who writes about the environmental sciences for UC Davis.