Using Boston As A Lab.
Danielle Parchure, Winnifred Brobbey, Charlotte Robbins, and Linz Owor at the Boylston Street MBTA stop, one of several where they collected data as part of field work for EH 804. Photo: Mike Saunders
Using Boston As A Lab
With the Greater Boston area as an abundant source of data, students in the Field Methods in Exposure Science class learn the fundamentals of exposure assessment and study design.
The adage “the path to learning doesn’t stop at the door“ has never been more timely for students in the School of Public Health, where the classroom extends beyond lecture halls and into the streets, neighborhoods, and transit systems of Greater Boston. It is especially true for students in EH 804, the School’s course on Field Methods in Exposure Science, which treats the urban environment as a living laboratory where students can explore the complex environmental and socioeconomic factors that affect public health.
The class is designed to guide students through understanding why assessment of exposures is critically important to environmental and occupational health practice and research. Case study reviews underscore the role of these evaluations in common academic and work settings, as students learn how assessments can help determine compliance with health and safety regulations, and levels of toxicologic and human health risks.
Class instructor Kipruto Kirwa, an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Health, says it is essential that the course reflect the School of Public Health’s surroundings, which are teeming with learning opportunities.
“We jump on the T, hop on a bike, or in a car and come into the office. But between where we live and where we work, there’s an entire community that we bypass every morning and every evening,” Kirwa says. “There’s a lot of public health between the office and my apartment, and our classroom focuses on this environment of the community around us.”
The coursework focuses on fundamentals of exposure assessment, including concepts and methods of study design, basic monitoring strategies, field data collection, and data analysis and interpretation. Students review relevant case studies and consult with subject-matter experts before splitting into teams to design and conduct a field monitoring project. The fieldwork is the course’s core element that allows students—under the guidance of instructors and advisors—to develop their own exposure assessment strategies, collect and analyze data, prepare a final report to be shared with the other teams.
Winnifred Brobbey, an MPH student who trained as a physician in Ghana, says the course’s step-by-step, hands-on approach was both engaging and practical. “The class walked us through the entire research process, starting from designing a clear and meaningful research question, to data collection, analysis, and finally communicating findings,” Brobbey says. Perhaps most importantly, she says it provided her with confidence in her ability to conduct research independently.
“I think the best practice starts with very good theory,” Kirwa says. “We do a lot of work in constructing a feasible question that students can answer within a short time and within the resources that they have available.” Ideally, students learn that the time spent thinking deeply and critically about what they want to research—and how to conduct it—is essential to success. “It sounds all good until you actually have to do something out there. Then you realize, ‘I don’t know, did I ask the right question?’ So we start first by intentionally spending an inordinate amount of time making sure the research question is the right one,” Kirwa says.
There’s also another component, Kirwa says, one as equally important as crafting the right question: acknowledging that none of the instructors knows everything. “This class benefits from inviting subject matter experts, starting with our colleagues in the department and the school and by inviting people who are actually out there in the community.”
Those real-world experiences were also bolstered by input from Stephanie Grady, a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Environmental Health, who, in a full-circle moment for her, was the teaching assistant for the class she had taken as a doctoral student in 2020. After earning her PhD in 2024, Grady has participated in studies that examined the effects of air pollution, excessive noise, extreme heat, and other environmental stressors on cardiovascular disease, mental health, and behavioral outcomes.
Grady says the field methods class gives students a genuine perspective of the difficulty of collecting good data. “It sets students up to basically create their own research design and their own studies. There’s a lot of planning that goes into a research study.”
Additionally, Grady says, the occasional unpredictable elements of the real-world laboratory add extra layers of complexity for the class, a mix of master’s and doctoral students. “It’s hard sometimes to piece out your exposure from other correlated exposures. You realize that you can’t control everything and that things just happen and you have to just roll with it. That’s the part that usually is the hardest to kind of manage.”
Student Charlotte Robbins, a PhD candidate in environmental health, says she appreciated the way Kirwa and Grady emphasized close attention to detail and rigor in designing and conducting her team’s exposure assessment, noise levels at various MBTA subway stops. The course was unique in allowing students to “choose our own projects and connect them to everyday public health issues that are important to people in Boston.”
Other teams compared air pollution concentrations between gas and induction stoves; manganese levels in residential water in Boston, Brookline, and and Somerville; and the air quality conditions of urban roads under alternating pedestrian and vehicular use. Not all of the studies produced solid findings, but that wasn’t the primary aim, says Danielle Parchure, a microbiologist who graduated with her MPH in January. “It was really more of a learning experience…. I think of this as a pilot project—we figured out how to do this kind of project in a rigorous way by the end of the semester. In the real world, all the data we wrote up for class would be scrapped and we would start fresh on the real study. Our methods changed as we proceeded, but that was part of the point—we learned how much iterating is needed to develop a good field work protocol.”
Her colleague and teammate Linz Owor says that she expected a theoretical class but the hands-on aspect was a pleasant surprise that helped her learn how meticulous the data collection process could be. “I remember sitting inside the MBTA Green Line, listening to and watching the rails in a way I never had before, all while taking notes,” Owor says. “Our findings showed consistently higher noise levels on curved track sections, which could be a simple detail, but shows how features in the environment can dictate people’s exposure and health.”
The class has a long history in the department yet has evolved and adapted over the years with each new instructor. Kirwa says he made sure to speak with the last few instructors of the class to collect their insights, and teamwork and time management are still key tenets of the course. But, Kirwa says, the class takes pains to address contemporary issues such as environmental justice and ethics and a substantial portion of class time now devoted to artificial intelligence. “These were not traditionally part of the class, but I think they’re just so important now that students need to be equipped to know about and use them,” Kirwa says.
New learning tools such as AI present new challenges, so Kirwa has adapted the coursework to account for way some aspects are valued. One example is the shift away from valuing a student’s statistical coding to account for the ability of AI tools to craft clean, elegant code.
Kirwa, Grady, and the students all agree on one thing: EH 804 is a rigorous class. Parchure says, “It was a huge ask to design, conduct, analyze, and write up a real-world study—even a small one—in the space of one semester.” Parchure adds, “it was a really valuable experience because we got to experience field work for ourselves. This was a great learning-by-doing class.”
Ahsan Manji and Sydney Boothe, students in a previous Field Methods class, also shared their observations.