From One Coalition, Dozens of Projects Advance Asian American Health in Communities
Epidemiologist MyDzung Chu, an assistant professor at Tufts University School of Medicine, likes bringing people together—especially people from Tufts and Boston’s Chinatown, all in the service of addressing Asian health disparities through community-based research.
Chu is the executive director of Addressing Disparities in Asian Populations through Translational Research (ADAPT), a coalition that seeks to connect partners and resources across Tufts and the Greater Boston area to improve the physical and mental health of Asian American populations, especially those who live in Chinatown, where Tufts School of Medicine is located.
“We are a strong coalition of community-based organizations, most of whom serve Chinatown, and faculty partners across Tufts University and Tufts Medical Center,” Chu said. “We serve as an incubation and convening space for research that can lead to action. And our community and clinical partners can use the data, partnerships, and publicity to continue the prevention and mitigation work that they’re doing on the ground.”
ADAPT, founded in 2011, is housed within the Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute’s Community and Stakeholder Engagement Program. ADAPT has already supported more than two dozen wide-ranging projects, such as addressing problem gambling, the impact of public art installations on health and community building, access to Parkinson’s disease care and research trials among Asian Americans, and more, all carried out in collaboration with community partners.
The experiences and partnerships fostered by ADAPT have also inspired and informed part of Tufts’ first-year medical school curriculum. Alice Tang, a professor in the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine and a member of the ADAPT steering committee, works with ADAPT’s community partners to teach first-year students about social determinants of health through experiential learning in Chinatown.
“We want the students to know this is not just a place to go to school or work, or to go as a tourist, but to see there is a community that lives here, and to be a part of and contribute to that community,” she said.
Quantifying Heat and Air Pollution in Chinatown
One of the research projects facilitated by ADAPT is Heat Equity and Resilience in Open Spaces (HEROS), a collaboration between Chu and John Durant, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Tufts School of Engineering, as well as Jenny Huang, director of community design and planning at the Asian Community Development Corporation (ACDC) and Ponnapa Prakkamakul, a multidisciplinary artist and landscape architect. Other team members include research associate Kiran Kui and several students from various institutions, including two Tufts environmental engineering undergraduates and one Tufts community health undergraduate.
Chu said that Chinatown is one of the hottest and most polluted neighborhoods in the city. It’s surrounded by major air pollution sources like highways and transit stations, and it’s an urban heat island due to the density of concrete, asphalt, and other impervious surfaces and the lack of trees and open space.
Many residents live or work in places without air conditioning, putting them at high risk for heat stroke. “For residents of Chinatown, poor air quality and high heat are really felt as daily challenges,” Huang said, “so they have been really responsive and curious about the HEROS study.”
Durant led the students in setting up sensors at 12 parks and open spaces in Chinatown to measure temperature, humidity, and levels of small particulate matter (less than 2.5 microns in diameter), working with ACDC and Chu to identify appropriate sites and obtain permissions. The data, collected in July and August 2023, found uniformly high levels of pollution, peaking during times of high traffic, and high daytime temperatures.
The project team hosted a series of workshops to share the data with Chinatown residents. Attendees learned about air pollution sources and hazards as well as mitigation techniques for both heat and air pollution, such as landscaping with plants that cast shade and absorb pollutants or choosing light-colored materials for park equipment.
A Tufts Springboard-funded project will build on HEROS by evaluating the effectiveness of these techniques in a redesign of Reggie Wong Park, where basketball courts are surrounded on all sides by highways, railroad tracks, and a power plant.
For Durant, one of the most remarkable aspects of HEROS was the teamwork between Tufts and the community. “The quality of the collaboration that we had with community partners was really strong,” he said. “The people in Chinatown are concerned about environmental quality and they really engaged with the team.” Durant credits Chu with creating that collaborative atmosphere.
Huang agreed. “Dr. Chu brings all the technical expertise and all the institutional resources she has, but also works hand-in-hand with community partners to put the Chinatown community at the center of what she’s doing,” she said. “It’s a great model for other people who are interested in bringing their research to bear on the important issues of the communities where their institutions are located.”
Introducing First-Year Medical Students to Chinatown
Centering the experiences of Chinatown residents and organizations is also the focus of a module in a first-year medical school class called Population Health and the Profession of Medicine (PHPM).
Tang, who designed the Chinatown module, said, “We teach social determinants of health in a place-based learning modality using Chinatown. The important thing for me is for students to learn about the community where they are going to be for the next four years.”
Tang draws on ADAPT partnerships and research throughout the module, which begins with a panel of speakers including Suzanne Lee, the board chair at the Chinatown Community Land Trust, a retired principal of Josiah Quincy Elementary School, and a Chinatown resident. “The first thing I encourage students to look at is to understand the history and understand what the community is struggling with currently and what role Tufts plays,” Lee said. “Through these discussions, students begin to ask what they can do and what their role in this is.”
After a tour of Chinatown led by ACDC, Tang divides the students into 12 groups and assigns each group a different topic, such as healthcare access, youth development, and housing and gentrification. Depending on the topic, students might interview Tufts researchers or representatives from community organizations to learn more, or they might review relevant ADAPT-supported research. For example, students exploring heat stress, traffic, and air pollution dive into the details of the HEROS study.
At the end of the module, all the groups present what they’ve learned to the class.
“I really appreciated that Dr. Tang was interested in emphasizing the footprint of Tufts in Chinatown,” said Ariella Wagner, MBS23, M27. In fact, she wishes all medical schools helped students learn about and connect with local communities. That’s why she is working with Tang and Jennifer Greer-Morrissey, the civic life manager for health sciences at Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University, to evaluate the impact of the course. “It would be really great if we could show to other schools that this is a valuable way to train cultural competency,” Wagner said.
Now in her second year of medical school, Wagner continued her involvement in the class by serving as a mentor for the first-year students who were assigned the topic of domestic violence. Wagner had previously been trained as a domestic violence counselor through a Tisch Fellowship, and she felt she could offer some insight into Asian culture, as well. “I am an Asian American and my mother is an immigrant from China,” she said, “so I use that background to help folks in class understand why domestic violence might be underreported in Asian communities because of language barriers.”
The class also had a lasting impact on Alexis Perry, M27, who was assigned the topic of health care disparities among elderly residents in Chinatown. Perry, who grew up on the South Shore, was drawn to Tufts in part because of the opportunity to work with the Chinatown community. She quickly formed a connection with the staff and residents at the Greater Boston Chinese Golden Age Center. “We saw the amazing work the center has done to offer culturally sensitive programs for their elders, helping to improve their quality of life,” she said. “One area we felt like we could contribute to was music. Music can enhance cognitive skills and motor coordination, and it’s a way of connecting with others.”
Since then, Perry and a few of her classmates have been presenting twice-monthly music programs at the center. They play instruments and sing, handing out maracas to the residents so they can play along. Perry has even learned new songs in Chinese to bring back happy memories to the residents.
“This experience showed us that we can work with community partners and advocate for our patients’ physical, psychological, and social wellbeing,” she said.
The music program Perry set in motion is run through the Community Service Learning (CSL) program, making it available to other students now and in the future. “Dr. Tang’s and Dr. Chu’s efforts have really energized more students into getting involved in the Chinatown community in an ongoing way,” said Greer-Morrissey, who oversees the CSL program.
That’s music to Chu’s ears, who thinks of ADAPT as an incubator where meaningful community partnerships and conversations lead to projects and initiatives that in turn spawn more opportunities for learning and collaboration – and ultimately, increased health, wellbeing, and visibility for Asian populations in Boston and beyond.
“ADAPT establishes the trust and foundation from which research and education initiatives can spring,” she said.
Tufts Springboard
An intramural grant program aiming to stimulate high-impact research, Tufts Springboard helped to support, in part, the research described here.
Sponsored by the provost and vice provost for research as well as Tufts Medicine, Tufts Springboard investments are designed to solidify the university's status as an Association of American Universities member and as an R1, very high research activity university.
Department:
Public Health and Community Medicine