Inaccessibility to the findings of environmental and public health research, in readily usable
form, is a major barrier to public's and study participants' abilities to understand and apply
those findings to reduce their exposure to environmental hazards and improve health outcomes.
Such available report-back of research results (RBRR) requires easily understood and visualized
data presentations, dissemination, and overcoming ethical and cultural barriers to effective
information distribution. This project aims to develop an ethically-sound RBRR approach that
can build environmental health literacy (EHL) and make results accessible, by creating the novel
Translating Research to Action & Knowledge (TRAK) Portal –a web-based, smartphone-
accessible tool for study participants and communities. To advance RBRR, our approach aims to
effectively serve both individuals and their communities' needs. Earlier we found that study
participants want to see how their data compares to those of other populations/geographic
regions, and to see their data contextualized both for themselves (what does this mean for me?)
and their communities (how does this impact my community?). The TRAK Portal will
encompass these foundational themes, in a modifiable tool that allows scalability across studies,
and will publish open-source code. The project will leverage findings from 17 prior RBRR
studies and >900 study participants, to create an interactive TRAK web tool. It will be developed
initially to provide RBRR of silicone wristband-based chemical exposure data but will be
extendable to scale across multiple data/study types. The project will promote and enable data
sharing within and across studies, and will learn directly from RBRR study participants, to
inform a qualitatively improved RBRR process responsive to community and cultural norms and
will advance EHL by discovering and thus leveraging people's motivations toward decision-
making to reduce and prevent exposures to environmental contaminants. Input from
Community and Expert Advisory Boards and Community Engagement Studios will identify
preferences, perceived risks and benefits, barriers, and facilitators to efficacious RBRR, learning
from diverse populations (rural, urban, Hispanic, environmental justice), testing the Portal in
two current NIH-funded studies, for diverse perspectives: 1) Fair Start – inner-city cohort of
pregnant women (predominantly Latinx, low-socioeconomic status (SES), aged 18+, speaking
English or Spanish); and 2) St. Helen’s – suburban, mostly white non-Hispanic, middle-SES
English-speaking cohort aged 5+ impacted by toxic waste). The project will identify and
integrate ethical approaches for the best RBRR execution to increase health equity.
