This is a transcript of the Spur of the Moment episode “Health and well-being in populations with Sheryl Magzamen.” It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: Our science becomes really challenging because not only what happens at the behavioral level, but what happens in our environment in terms of the exposures, but also the choices that we have for what we’re exposed to. And sometimes, unfortunately, we don’t have choices. So there’s a lot that goes on in terms of understanding health and wellbeing in populations. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Hello and welcome to CSU Spur of the Moment, the podcast of Colorado State University’s SPUR Campus in Denver, Colorado. 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: People are different, and again, because epidemiology is a population science, we try to find interventions that help the most people. 

Jocelyn Hittle: On this podcast, we talk with experts in food, water, health and sustainability and learn about their current work and their career journeys. 

I’m Jocelyn Hittle, associate Vice Chancellor of the CSU Spur Campus, and I’m thrilled to have with me today Dr. Sheryl Magzamen. Dr. Magzamen is an associate professor in the Department of Environmental and Radiological Health Sciences at CSU. She studies the impact of social factors and environmental exposure on chronic disease, particularly respiratory diseases. She has conducted field work across the US with the goal of informing policy to protect the health of all residents. Dr. Magzamen earned her PhD at Berkeley, her undergraduate degree at Cornell, and she teaches classes at CSU in environmental health, geographic, information systems and epidemiology. For the 2022, 23 academic year, she is a research fellow at the US Green Building Council in Washington, DC. Welcome Dr. Magzamen. 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: Thanks, Jocelyn, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me on the podcast. 

Jocelyn Hittle: It’s our pleasure. So, can you tell us a little bit about your current work, your research, air pollution, epidemiology, maybe we can start with some definitions. When you’re asked to describe the work that you do, how do you break it down? 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: So, the word epidemiology actually comes from the Greek, which is epi, which means a pawn or among us, and then dem, like democracy means people, the same root, and then ology is the study of something. So we study what is upon people and the health concepts aren’t really built into the word, but epidemiology is really the study of the distribution and determinants of health in a population. So you may ask, “Well, how is that different than medical in the medical field or physicians in what they do? So usually how we describe it is that the fields of medicine really focuses on one patient at a time, and a patient would come into an office, seek treatment for something, they’re not feeling well or something hurts and get a prescription or some kind of diagnosis for them to be better. So epidemiologists actually focus on entire populations. 

And what we do is take data that understands, for example, what the air quality levels are or what the level of people experiencing homelessness in a community would be or what the level of poverty would be, and try to understand how those determinants from multiple factors, including the social factors, environmental factors, delivery of healthcare, what the state of an infectious disease might be, which we all lived through for the past three years, and understand how that influences the health and wellbeing of population. 

So you might look at how many children went to the emergency department for an asthma exacerbation, we might look at how many people developed cancer over a certain amount of time in a neighborhood, we might try to understand how many people got Covid and what ages they were and what they did for work. And we might try to understand why people developed cardiovascular disease or diabetes earlier in life and while some neighborhoods, potentially, are different than other neighborhoods. So all of this is really to inform public health practice and research that help us develop tools to effectively manage and decrease diseases in our populations and keep people healthy. That’s ultimately the goal of an epidemiologist. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Okay. So I’ll summarize if I can, some of what you described, which is that epidemiology is really the study of health factors and how you might see trends or changes in an entire population. 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: That’s exactly right. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Okay. Phew, I managed to… 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: You got it. 

Jocelyn Hittle: To simplify a little bit, but understanding that it is a very complex field. You are looking at all kinds of factors that might influence health. 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: Yeah. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Can you give us some examples? What are you focused on? 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: Sure. So right now, one of the things that we’re focused on is that we have a study in the Central Valley of California where there are several things going on all at once, and this is probably what makes epidemiology the hardest, is that people, as we know, we’re not exposed to one thing at a time. So the folks that we work with in the Central Valley, a lot of them are employed in agriculture so they’re picking, potentially, fruits or vegetables that get shipped all over United States. But as they do this outside, they’re exposed to air pollution, they’re exposed to heat, they’re exposed to, potentially, wildfire smoke when there’s a bad wildfire season in California and they’re exposed to pesticides. So the idea that they are breathing in all these pollutants and how… Mostly, what I’m interested in studying is the lungs. As you said before, I study a lot about respiratory health. 

So we inhale all these things that swirl around in our air and then get distributed throughout the body and can cause ill health in any number of ways. So we know that pesticides, for example, the ones that are sprayed in California, are associated with neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s disease in older adults, and our group is documenting the relationship between pesticide exposure and lung health. So potentially, how efficient our lungs are at taking an air and releasing it, and, potentially, also, how that pesticide exposure interacts with other exposures like air pollution, specifically ozone, which, unfortunately, we experience a lot of in the front range or particular matter, which is kind of the sooty substance that comes from anything that we burn, but also thinking about wildfire smoke and the ash that it produces, the very small tiny particulates that come from that are able to be breathed in deep into our lungs and interfere with how our body functions. 

So all of these things are changing over time, and I think the dynamics of some of the things that we’re concerned about, like wildfires, we can’t often predict where they come and when they come, how big they’ll be and where the smoke goes. So trying to chase it, in a sense, and get a sense of measuring the exposure so then we can link that back to a health outcome in our community members has been really challenging. And then, on the health side, figuring out what to measure in the community members. So we ask them questions about their health, how they’re feeling, we take measurements of their lungs called spirometry, we might take a sample of saliva that measures how much inflammation can be found in their saliva, which is pretty interesting. So there’s a lot that goes on into these studies. And a couple of things that keep us motivated are this idea that there are some people in our society that are unequally exposed to these pollutants, working within an environmental justice framework and trying to understand that not everyone has access to clean air, clean water, and clean soil. 

And another part of it is that there are really strong agencies across United States, including the EPA and state and local health agencies who take any epidemiologic data that we end up publishing and they review it to understand if they can change laws or policies that protect population from these harmful environmental exposures. And that’s one of the best things about this field, which is that our science works and our science actually demonstrates health connections that we have these public agencies that can help create cleaner environments for us to live in. So it’s pretty rewarding work, although what we call that translational pipeline, so how long we get from doing a science to actually doing the policy is a very long process. We’re talking years, if not decades. 

Jocelyn Hittle: I want to come back to some additional questions about the policy work, but let’s focus down on some of what you described in terms of the complexities of the work that you’re doing and what it is that people are exposed to. So you might have someone who is working either with your study in the Central Valley or really anywhere in the US, someone who goes about their day-to-day life and is exposed to a variety of different things that might impact their health and may have habits of their own that either have positive or negative negative impacts on their health. And then you are looking at both, “Okay, what are they exposed to and how might that be contributing to what their health outcomes are?” But then also, how do you measure the health itself of the people in the population that you’re looking at? So… 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: Yes. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Definitely very complicated. 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: It is. 

Jocelyn Hittle: And then what you mentioned is that that can help inform policy, but are there interventions that you can then recommend for a specific population to say, “Hey, if you change your behavior or add this thing in or take this thing out of your day-to-day, it might improve your health.”? 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: We try. So that’s the goal of public health and often, we think about epidemiology as the science of public health. So what do those interventions look like? Usually, it starts with understanding how big that health effect is, how big a problem is air pollution in terms of respiratory health, how big of a problem is pesticides or traffic or anything that we could potentially study. So the idea of doing intervention work is a little bit more challenging for outdoor workers. So we think about doing interventions in another setting. We have a number of studies in schools, for example. And going through the Covid pandemic really gave us some pause about, well, how do we keep teachers and students safe in schools when there’s a respiratory virus all around? So we had to act fairly quickly in that sense. So there’s ideas about doing things like wearing masks is a type of intervention, doing things like getting vaccinated is a type of intervention and doing things, let’s say, at a school, thinking about something that’s probably you don’t think about day to day, which is changing how much air comes in and out of your classroom. So that’s called the ventilation rate. 

And the idea is that the more air you have coming in and leaving your classroom, potentially, the more virus or any kind of harmful elements in the air, like bacteria or particulates, would also be taken out when that error is exchanged. So the idea of interventions are, yeah, we think we can make things better, but there’s questions about, can we make things better? Is it sustainable? So how much does it cost to make those things better? Are there other kind of downsides of making things better? So for example, if we change out air exchange… Like, if we increase the quality or the number of times air comes in and out of a classroom, does that potentially mean that your classroom changes temperature or that it’s more expensive for your school to do that? And unfortunately, that means that money may not be available for something else. But one of our biggest challenges in an intervention is, will people accept that intervention. 

So one of the earliest projects I worked on is looking at tobacco smoke and trying to understand if people will actually stop smoking indoors. Some of the projects I worked on was looking at bars and restaurants and this idea that when I was growing up, there was a smoking section in a restaurant and I didn’t go to bars growing up, but when I started to go to bars, when I… 

Jocelyn Hittle: Or in airplanes. In airplanes, there used to be smoking sections in an airplane. 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: Oh my gosh. Yeah, and it’s very hard to keep a smoking section separate from the whole rest of the airplane. So yeah, movie theaters used to be able to smoke and I think over the course of a generation, we have really decided that that’s not okay anymore. It’s not okay to smoke in indoor places. And despite all the evidence that we had about how bad smoking was for you and then how bad it was for the people that inhaled the cigarette smoke, even though they weren’t smoking, what we call secondhand smoke, that even though we had all the science, it was really hard to get people to stop smoking because we know that nicotine is addictive. So in terms of policies, there’s a lot of options that we had on the table. For instance, there are quit lines that you can call to get help to quit smoking and change your behavior, there are now nicotine patches and gum and medication to help curve cravings for cigarettes. But what’s been really effective is actually changing the way and the where people can smoke. 

So again, having smoke-free workplace laws has been incredibly effective for not only to get people to stop smoking, but for people who don’t smoke to be exposed to less tobacco smoke, which is pretty amazing. And the other thing that we did was make it really, really expensive to smoke. So the price of the cigarettes, in terms of taxes, have gone up exponentially. Unfortunately, what that means for people who can’t seem to quit the smoking habit is just really, really expensive for them. And again, it’s very hard to try all these different types of interventions and find the one that sticks best because people are different. And again, because epidemiology is a population science, we try to find interventions that help the most people, but we know that those aren’t particularly effective for all people. 

But again, in terms of thinking about those interventions for smoking, eliminating smoking in workplaces, that include bars and restaurants, they greatly reduce not only the amount of cigarettes that smokers were smoking, but also encouraged many to quit and also protected other people who don’t smoke from the effects of secondhand smoke. So their intervention side’s really exciting, but that’s also a huge area of study that brings in a whole other set of disciplines, like we talk to psychologists and sociologists and economists and people that think a lot about behavior and what influences behavior. So a lot of times when we talk about environmental epidemiology, often, the exposures are things that we can’t control, like the quality of the air or if we’re exposed to agricultural pesticides. But there’s a lot that influences health that we do control in terms of our behaviors. Things like, again, smoking’s an example, how much we eat and how much we exercise is always a strong example of what influences our health. 

But a lot of times, we live in communities where we don’t have control of a lot of factors, like the quality of housing or the amount of traffic in a certain community or the access we have to healthy foods. So there’s a lot that goes on in terms of understanding health and wellbeing and populations. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Let’s talk a little bit about the work that you’re doing, your team is doing. I know you have a number of collaborators in Denver with the Globeville and Elyria Swansea neighborhoods, which are just adjacent to the CSU Spur campus, and have a variety of air quality challenges from a variety of different directions and sources. Can you say a little bit about the work you’re doing? 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: Yeah, so what this project is, which is called the Environs team at CSU, is working with the Globeville area, Swansea residents on a GES health study. And our idea is to try to take all the data that’s been collected in these neighborhoods and understand what the health impacts are. So we know the GES residents are exposed to traffic from pollutants that are on I-70, I-25 and the kind of surrounding roads in the neighborhoods, emissions from the Suncor facility, as well as other industrial facilities in the GES area. We also know that there’s been a lot of construction in the area too, that is associated with the widening of I-70 and the digging of the tunnel for the cap. We know that not a lot of places to get helpful foods in terms of built environment, there’s noise. 

So the GES communities are incredibly resilient and incredibly engaged and active in kind of their community, which has been really wonderful. But the idea is that, how do we take everything that GES residents are exposed to and understand how those factors impact health and wellbeing? So what the residents are working on now is that we’re working with a community council who have been wonderful representatives of the community to try to understand how we take all the studies that have been done, and that relates to the air quality and the soil quality that relates to kind of the two locations of the Superfund sites, the former sites of the lead smelters, the water quality, and also the opportunities for healthy living through going to parks and having places to recreate, having places to congregate and be with your family. How do we understand how that impacts the many health outcomes that folks are concerned with in the GES neighborhoods? And one of the primary ones is childhood asthma. 

So we have a lot of parents talk to us, potentially, about their children’s health and especially their respiratory health and how their asthma can be managed and how that is influenced by mostly the ambient environment, the outdoor environment, but potentially, things that are going on in their home as well. And what do we do to make things better? So Jocelyn, this gets back to your idea of intervention. So what do we do to make things better? Our first step is trying to figure out the relationships between the exposures in the community and the outcomes that the community experiences, especially for something like asthma, which is such a high concern. So we’re talking to residents now and trying to figure out where their largest concerns are and how do we connect all the studies that have been done before to the health data that we have now, that’s available. 

And unfortunately, what we hear from a lot of the residents is that they feel like they’ve been studied enough, that people kind of come into the neighborhoods, they take the data and then they leave, but for those… And unfortunately, we’re guilty of that too. Our motivation to publish these papers and to kind of get to what we said before, that translational pipeline, to get to the government agencies to make things better takes a long time. And unfortunately, sometimes, is not then fed back into the community to understand, “Hmm, okay, we’ve identified the problem, what should we do next?” And that’s [inaudible 00:19:06] really, the community group has been so fantastic about sharing their lived experiences and trying to identify what works and what doesn’t work and where they have concerns, but realizing that the science actually needs to be communicated in a way where the residents understand what we did, understand what the strengths and limitations of what our studies are, and also, potentially, understand what we can do with something and what we can’t do with something. 

For example, when we get back to talking about population health and what epidemiology is, we often talk about group averages. So we might say, for example, people that live near the freeway have a higher likelihood or higher chance of having a child with asthma. But again, the challenge of a population study is that we can’t say that that means my child’s going to have asthma or someone else’s child’s going to have asthma, yes or no, it’s really looking at the mean of the population. And I think translating that is really hard to understand and really, I think, is a bit frustrating in terms of understanding, “What does this mean for my child or my household or someone that I’m taking care of, potentially an older adult in my home?” 

So there’s a lot that we still have to work on explaining to our community members about what we can confidently say from these studies and what, potentially, is hard for us to say because we can’t tell what that means for you in your home. We can tell you what this means for the community and the neighborhoods, and we’re trying to work on that communication. It’s a big part of what we’re doing with the GES community. 

Jocelyn Hittle: So you’ve told us about some of the research that you have been working on, you also teach when you’re on campus. What’s your experience engaging with students like? 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: I love being in the classroom. I taught a class called human disease in the environment, and what I call it is a put it together class, because usually, it’s our College of Veterinary Medicine, biomedical student undergrads that take that class, and the idea is that they have already taken all their kind of building block classes, like they’ve taken microbiology and toxicology and epidemiology, and this class is a put it together class. So once they have those building blocks of the science, what do they do with the science? So getting back to Covid, one of the articles I gave them to read was an article that was published by Pro Publica that was in the Atlantic that talked about Baltimore City, Baltimore public schools, and this idea that during Covid, that schools provide so much more than learning, especially in resource challenged communities like Baltimore, there’s safe places to shelter. There’re often places where students get two meals a day, there are places where they have a community that cares about them and supports them and they’re often places too that the students can be safe while their parents are outside working. 

So what happens all of a sudden when you don’t have that facility or that community space anymore, and students are working from home, often without computers or strong internet connections or parents that can help them with all their online activities to learn because parents are often occupied doing other things like working, taking care of other kids in the home? And we talked about it. Did Baltimore make the right decision to close the schools or should have the schools stayed open to maintain the social, emotional, environmental wellbeing of their students? And nobody had a good answer. I think the students, because I think they recognized that this was a decision that… There was no good answer, unfortunately. But what I tried to remind them is that when they go out into the world and they’re working in health departments and they’re leading public health initiatives and environmental health initiatives, that, often, they’re going to be called to make those hard decisions about, do we close schools or do we shut down a plant? Or what do we do about oil and gas drilling in our community? Or what do we do about traffic laws? 

So all these decisions often come down to our leaders in public health and environmental health. So although it was just a class exercise, I think that one of the things that I love preparing students to do is thinking about how they take information and weigh it to actually help make decisions. One of my favorite things to do with the students is make sure that they know that this is not just an academic exercise, that this is preparing them for the real world. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Yeah, it’s really important. Of course, we always want to be preparing students for the real world in addition to getting the basics of a scientific field or whichever field that they are in. And to understand that really, it’s almost never as simple or as easy as you might want it to be and the real world has a lot of trade offs built into it. 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: And one of the, I think, another fun experience that we do with our undergrads is getting them into research and getting them in the field, collecting data, interacting with community members or in the lab kind of evaluating samples that we’ve collected. Because often in epidemiology, what we’ve found is that, there’s answers in the back of the book. We do our problem sets and there’s things that they can solve and check if they have the right answer, and that’s great. Of course, we want them to understand those fundamental skills, again, those building blocks of education. But I think when we get into research, we do research because we don’t know the right answer or because things that we’ve seen, again, related to climate change, related to global pandemics, is that we don’t have the answers and we have to think about what we know and act with the best information that we have to, again, make sure that we maintain as much health and wellbeing as possible. And it’s hard. It’s really, really hard to do that. 

So I think that the students are a little, sometimes, trepidatious when they do so well in class, and then they get to the point where they’re like, “Well, I don’t know what the answer is here.” And relying on them and trying to encourage them to [inaudible 00:25:17] all those tools that they have learned in their coursework and think about, “Okay, how do we evaluate the evidence and how do we make a best decision based on the things we know?” Those answers are not in the back of the book. And I think that training our students to think through those problems and how to address them is, I think, one of the most important things we do as faculty. 

Jocelyn Hittle: So can you tell us a little bit about what you’re doing right now? You’re on sabbatical working with US Green Building Council. What is a day in the life for you now? 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: So, US Green Building Council is in a really exciting place. So these are the folks that do all of our lead certifications. So when we have a nice energy efficient building, we have several on campus, these are the folks that kind of put together the criteria to make sure that those buildings are sustainable. They have a unit called the Center for Green Schools, and I got a chance to work with them as part of an EPA project that we had at CSU, working with one of our local school districts on the front range, and really trying to understand this balance between sustainability and health because they are actually two different things, oddly enough, and they’re both very focused on the environment, but in different ways. So the idea of sustainability, from what I understand, I’m still learning, this is why I’m here on sabbatical, is trying to make sure that, especially our built environment, our buildings, our homes, our schools, have a very small energy and climate footprint. 

And that is in terms of the building material that is used in the building, the amount of natural resources that are used, for example, water and how that be building is heated and cooled. Can we do that in the most energy efficient way with the least impact on the environment? And there’s some other elements that get built into that as well, such as understanding day-lighting, for example. So using natural light as much as we can. We’re so lucky we have so many sunny days on their front range and eliminating things like overhead lighting, not only to reduce potential energy, but it seems that day-lighting is also associated with better academic achievement in students, which is great. So I think some of the challenges we’re thinking about is, well, how do we start to implement health outcomes and some of those sustainability outcomes? And there are some tensions there. For example, we talked a little bit, before, about this idea of ventilation in a classroom and ventilation equipment are very expensive for schools to retrofit or to even change out, to be more energy efficient. And often, they are expensive to run. 

If we want to say, again, this idea of air exchanging, keeping classrooms having low particulate matter and low carbon dioxide. So how do we think about where that optimal point is for kids who are in a classroom to have fresh air, but also are having facilities managers heating and cooling their building efficiently? So how do we balance those needs of, let’s say, a school’s facility manager to actually think through keeping kids, teachers and staff healthy in schools? It’s been really fun to kind of think through this idea of green schools and how we move forward as so many schools are at the end of their functional lifespan. What does it look like to actually build a new school from scratch? And it’s really exciting to think through those projects. 

Jocelyn Hittle: So, let’s talk a little bit how you got where you are. What was the journey from Sheryl Magzamen, four-year-old, to Dr Sheryl Magzamen, epidemiologist? 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: Oh, well, it’s a long journey. I’ll try to make it as not as winding as it actually took. I always loved reading. I think that I loved reading and I loved writing and growing up, I wanted to be a journalist, actually. I love listening to news on the radio, I love watching the news on TV and I love reading the newspaper, and I just thought it was exciting and just a good place to understand how our society works, the news. So something kind of clicked in me. I don’t know when, but it was, potentially, early in high school when I discovered biology. I took biology in ninth grade and understanding genetics and just how… We have this idea of a fingerprint for us and that was really, I’m going to date myself here, but it was the early 1990s, and just understanding things that we take for granted now because we have all of our TV shows like CSI and everything that happens really quickly. But this idea of using scientific information to understand who we are and how to identify us, I found fascinating. 

So I thought a little bit about going to college, being a genetic engineer, being a biomedical engineer, being a physician, and what I realized is that I don’t like being in a lab. I’m not good at it at all. And my first day of chemistry lab in college, I dropped my entire lab cabinet on the floor and broke all the glass in there. And I just realized that although I liked science, that lab life wasn’t for me. But also, I didn’t grow up in a community where there were lots of scientists, so I didn’t know what they did. Most of the parents in my community were teachers or accountants or lawyers so having these kind of role models for what someone could be when they grew up in terms of a science career, I didn’t really see. So when I got into later years in college, I had a really fortunate experience with a really, really wonderful mentor who turned me on to public health. And this idea that I could do science, but maybe thinking about more on the population level, was really, I think, where I wanted to be. 

And I ended up doing papers on how healthcare systems influence health behaviors in different countries and just, again, things I wasn’t normally exposed to, but got really excited by this idea of doing more like public serving science. So this idea that I can do research, but maybe not at a lab basis or in a lab bench, but actually thinking through how that would influence a community. So I ended up getting my MPh in health policy and thought a lot about, we talked a little bit about, before, about smoking and how that influences populations, and I did some policy research for a couple years thinking, as we talked about before, how smoking related policies in communities are implemented. And doing that, being on the policy side was really fascinating, but I realized I missed the science. 

And because I was focused on respiratory health, thinking about smoking, I got introduced to the concept of pediatric asthma, which is such a fascinating complex disease because it takes into account our genetics, our behavior, our built environment, our social environment, our air quality, the quality of our healthcare system, the access to our healthcare system and it was kind of exactly the place where I wanted to be because I think that it was complex, it was interesting, and it was also, I think, necessary to think through some of the larger problems that we have in communities that have high levels of air pollution. And that led me to where I am today, about thinking about respiratory health. So I’ve been working on very, very similar problems for about the last 22 years, so either I’m not that good at it or that it’s really interesting and complex and there’s always new things to answer. So for example, earlier in my career, where I started with tobacco control, that was studying cigarette smoke, it was pretty easy to transition to studying something like traffic because it’s technically the same thing. 

It’s combustion byproducts that we end up breathing in. It’s from different sources so the composition of that is a little bit different, and that translates pretty easily to wildfires too, because it’s things that burn and we breathe in. So it’s always something new so that gives us some challenges in the ways we think about measurement, both on the exposure side and the health side, but it’s also these very same concepts in terms of what we talked about before about environmental justice, which is that, if we’re thinking about interventions, do we intervene on reducing exposures to the environmental hazards, or are there social factors that we can intervene on that potentially raise up the standard of living in some of our communities and offer them better opportunities to work, to play and to live? So it’s really, even though I’ve been studying the similar thing over those last couple of decades that the questions and what we do about them have been so complex but so interesting, and engaging communities for these solutions has been an incredibly rewarding part of this work. 

Jocelyn Hittle: What has surprised you the most? 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: What surprised me the most, and I’ll talk about our Fresno study, and we have a wonderful team that goes out to Fresno to work, is how willing people are to open their doors and invite perfect strangers to come in and talk about their health and pesticides. It’s just so heartwarming, that trust that you talked about before, we work with a wonderful agency in central California called the Central California Environmental Justice Network and we’ve been working on them on building these studies. I started when I was in grad school and we’ve started these pesticide studies. We’ve been working for about five years now. So it didn’t happen overnight, but this idea that we work together and that working with this wonderful community organization kind of gives us this credentials to come in to community and feel like when they give us their data, that they trust us to do something useful with it, and we value that trust so much. So I have been surprised, if someone came and knocked on my door and asked me if I want to participate in an epidemiology study, I probably would not. Which is… 

Jocelyn Hittle: Well, I hope you would say yes. But I understand that some folks might not feel comfortable with that. So it is… 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: Yeah. 

Jocelyn Hittle: It’s heartening to hear that there are people who are opening their doors, and I think what you just described speaks to the difference between not trusting science or an institution, but trusting a person. So if they have a relationship with you or you come with a recommendation from a trusted source, that’s a very different thing, it’s a about trusting the individual scientist, that’s not as hard. 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: It is. Yeah. And it’s been a wonderful surprise. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Just to keep on the topic of maybe quicker wins, is there anything that you would advise a listener to do that might have an immediate, short-term positive impact on their respiratory health, what they’re breathing in indoor, outdoor? 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: Yeah, we talk about this a lot. We are collaborating on a EPA funded study with research and staff in atmospheric science as well as journalism communications at CSU, thinking about being air quality aware. And you can check what’s called the air quality index on your phone, most of us have it on our weather apps. You can check it online. The government is air now.gov, and understanding what that means. So especially if you are struggling to manage a chronic disease yourself or for someone in your house that you love, one of our community elders or younger children and infants maybe, potentially, making behavioral changes if the air quality is not good that day. So staying indoors more or potentially running errands at a different time, just to make sure that, especially if you’re a susceptible person, that you’re not being exposed to air quality that can exacerbate existing disease. 

Bringing this back to what we talked about about the California agricultural workers, this is not possible for all populations, unfortunately. So we’re doing some work with outdoor workers right now to, understand what could be feasible for natural resources employees and parks employees for bad air quality days, how can they protect their health? But one of the easiest things we can do is check the air quality, just like you would check the temperature to say, “Well, am I going to bring a raincoat?” Usually not in Colorado. I think the question is, “Am I going to bring my snow boots or not?” Or, “Where are my snow boots today?” And the same thing, you know, you might decide to shift some of your decisions based on the quality of air and that’s a quick and easy way to avoid poor air quality. 

Jocelyn Hittle: If people want to find out more information about your work, where will they go? 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: So we have a beginnings of a website, and our website is magzamen lab.org, and Magzamen is spelled M A G Z A M E N lab.org. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Okay, thank you. So my last question for you is a spur of the moment question. So you mentioned that you were interested in being a journalist. Is there a specific source that you are just a news junkie for? Like, “I always read X,” Or, “I always listen to Y.” 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: Yes. I always read the New York Times, and I will tell you for two reasons. One is because I’m a New Yorker, so when it’s baseball season, I always want to see how the Yankees are doing. That’s very important to me. 

Jocelyn Hittle: This is a polarizing moment on this podcast right now. 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: I’m sure it is. I’m sure it is, and I don’t mean to. It’s very hard. I want people to know this was not a choice. Since my family’s been in the country, they’ve been in New York so I did not really have a choice about what baseball team I rooted for so apologies to everyone out there, but I’m sure that those of you… 

Jocelyn Hittle: Ooh, apologies to Mets fans, though, also. 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: Well, the Mets came around a little later. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Okay. 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: Yeah. But it’s a good point. And I do not root against the Mets. If they do well, I’m happy for them also. So I read it just because that is the newspaper that I wanted to be a journalist, and it’s my hometown paper, and now it’s online, so it’s really easy to read. I will also say that the news can be a little bit depressing sometimes. So what the New York Times also offers is an amazing cooking section. So I am often rifling through the recipes, seeing what I could bake, sharing recipes with friends and colleagues. And even though there might be bad news sometimes and things get down, there’s always something fun to make in the kitchen. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Here you go. So a second spur of the moment question, then, if you’re a baker, what’s your specialty? 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: So we make a lot of banana mocha chocolate chip muffins in the house, and they’re really, really good. But Jocelyn, I will tell you, I have lived in Colorado for 10 years and I have not mastered high altitude baking. 

Jocelyn Hittle: It is hard. 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: Whatsoever. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Yeah, the struggle… 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: It’s really hard. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Is real. 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: The struggle is real. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Banana mocha chocolate chip muffins, though, I think even if you don’t get them exactly right, are still going to be good. 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: They’re good. And they have bananas in them, so they’re healthy, right? 

Jocelyn Hittle: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I love biscuits and I have not managed to make good biscuits in Colorado. 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: No, it’s really… Again, you’re right, the struggle is real. And what’s really funny is that if you ever buy King Arthur flour, they have a hotline to address any baking needs. And when I’ve called that hotline before, they’ve actually referred me to CSU extension to deal with my high altitude baking problems. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Wild. Okay. Well, it all comes full circle. 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: It really does. 

Jocelyn Hittle: [inaudible 00:41:15] our resources within our own institution we didn’t even know about. Well, thank you very much, Dr. Magzamen. Thank you so much for your time today. Appreciate you joining us on Spur of the Moment. 

Dr. Sheryl Magzamen: Thanks, Jocelyn. It was a pleasure. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Thanks again. 

The CSU Spur of the Moment Podcast is produced by Kevin Samuelson, and our theme music is by Ketza. Please visit the show notes for links mentioned in this episode. We hope you’ll join us in two weeks for the next episode. Until then, be well.