Today we’re excited to feature IRIS faculty member Christina H. Fuller, Associate Professor in the College of Engineering. Fuller joined the IRIS crew in 2022, and she’s been broadening our horizons since, reminding us that water isn’t the only element that people need to live healthy, happy lives; clean air is a crucial component to having resilient communities. 

Join us for an interview with Dr. Fuller, and learn about her journey from caring for the planet through recycling as a middle schooler to becoming a powerhouse of an engineer and scientist–using her work to research pressing questions about air quality and public health. 

Where did your interest in this field begin?

I am from the suburbs of Chicago, and was always interested in the environment and nature. I watched a lot of nature shows growing up, and always had a concern for animals and plants and the preservation of natural spaces. 

A fun fact about me that I often share in my classes is that I started my parents recycling when I was pretty young–probably in middle school–even before they had curbside services. I had my parents figure out where we could take our recycling, and we would gather up our plastic and paper and take them to the recycling plant. It was really important to me to think about the planet in general and what we could do to help. 

How did you settle on environmental engineering?

I went to Northwestern for my undergraduate degree, which is just north of Chicago. They have a great engineering program. I knew I wanted to do something environmental, and I had a choice between Environmental Science and Environmental Engineering. The engineering degree required all the science classes, plus civil engineering classes. I thought that would be a good way to go, because I was able to get the best of both worlds. I believed it would be a very practical degree as well. 

I went the environmental engineering route, and after college I worked for a few years in consulting, doing all kinds of introductory engineer work with water quality, permitting, flood prevention, design of wastewater treatment plans, and a little bit of air pollution measurement. 

How did you transition to social justice work and advocacy, and eventually research?

I found consulting  to be fun and challenging, but I didn’t find a lot of meaning in it. The work felt very contractual–I had to make sure that I had all my billable hours. I wanted to know why we were doing these particular projects, and where the instructions were really coming from. Then the company I worked for organized a meeting with the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC), which informs the EPA around environmental justice issues. So I got to be part of organizing that annual meeting, and a light bulb went off for me. I was fascinated by the connection between engineering in the environment in terms of pollution and human health and who’s being impacted. 

I decided to move to New York, where I pursued work with environmental justice organizations for several years. I ran organizing and advocacy campaigns, along with technical assistance on community research projects.  I felt that further training in science and public health would allow me to study very relevant questions and solutions to problems. 

So I went back to graduate school, and that’s what I did. I attended Harvard School of Public Health, and got my master’s and doctorate there. I had the opportunity to work on a community based participatory research project looking at near roadway air pollution and health effects. I worked with several community based organizations, the city of Somerville, MA, several universities, and it really prepared me to work collaboratively across multiple efforts. It was really cool to see cities, communities and universities all working together. 

When did you come to the University of Georgia?

​​After finishing my degree, I worked in public health at the College of Public Health at Georgia State University for 13 years, and then I moved to UGA in 2022. It feels like returning to my roots to work collaboratively on these issues that are important to environmental and human health, and to use research to determine what solutions we can develop and bring to communities. 

Fuller’s work falls into three main categories:

Monitoring community exposure to pollutants

Fuller identifies environmental exposures and populations that are disproportionately burdened. In order to design effective solutions, researchers need to understand how people are being exposed, where they’re being exposed, and for how long. 

Fuller is working with communities in the Atlanta area, where she is helping groups gather and interpret data about air quality. As this project is community-driven, community members helped decide where sensors should go, and have been collecting data for about a year. Next year, the researchers will analyze the data and see how it compares with nearby regulatory monitors–which are monitors used by the city to comply with regulations for air quality. There are only six regulatory monitors in the Atlanta area, and, depending on the type of pollutant measured, they may not be the best measure of what’s going on in communities. This project is exciting, because local monitoring will help communities view  a more accurate picture of the air quality landscape, and will help drive future planning decisions in a way that is proactive instead of reactive. 

Identifying green infrastructure solutions to shield communities from pollutants

Fuller studies the effectiveness of green infrastructure solutions at reducing exposure to roadway pollution. 

In a current project, Fuller and colleagues are testing how vegetation can be used as a tool to mitigate air pollution around schools in Phoenix, Arizona. With sensors in different locations, the researchers are trying to answer questions about how different amounts and types of green infrastructure (in this case, canopy cover), impact air quality. Specifically, the researchers are looking at particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide, both of which have important health implications. While they’re still gathering data in this project, Fuller found in a similar research project based in Atlanta that thick vegetation that provides canopy cover from ground up does the best job at filtering pollutants. 

This project is exciting on multiple levels; it also gives researchers the opportunity to compare low-cost monitors to more expensive regulatory monitors, which will allow them to determine their accuracy.

Community support and mobilization

Fuller works with communities to make funding more accessible, to build their capacity to research their own questions, and to scale up solutions for broad impact

Fuller heads the Georgia team of the Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Center (TCTAC), named REACT4EJ, which is focused on helping communities across the Southeast be competitive for federal environmental grants Historically, federal grants have been very difficult for local communities to access; they require complex application processes that stop many of the communities that could benefit from these resources. REACT4EJ, which is in its second year of a five-year grant, is dedicated to working with communities to prepare for  the application process, enabling many more people to bring needed money into their communities and bolster environmental research, education and resilience.