Date December 11, 2025

Classroom to community: Brown students quantify ‘environmental comfort’ across Rhode Island

By Carl Dimitri

Students in PHP1720 rolled up their sleeves this semester, conducting community-engaged research at 180 local sites, from downtown Providence to the new Pawtucket soccer stadium, revealing disparities in noise pollution and other public health concerns.

students hang posters up — The students of PHP1720 chose to present their findings at a community meeting at the Providence Public Library. Their research posters shared data on environmental comfort from Thayer Street to the new soccer stadium in Pawtucket.

Professor Erica Walker with students — Professor Erica Walker (right) discusses research posters with their student researchers who ranged from undergraduates to doctoral students.

student with her poster — Johanna Leang, a Brown undergraduate, with her poster comparing environmental comfort in Providence's Fox Point neighborhood to East Providence.

student presents poster to crowd — Members of the public were invited to the Providence Public Library to discuss the results of students' environmental assessment projects.

two students view a poster — PHP1720 students got the chance to view each other's projects at the community event.

students listen to a speaker — The crowd who gathered for the PHP1720 end of semester event included Brown University students and local community members.

At the start of each semester, Erica Walker, the RGSS Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at Brown, asks her students to think about everyday local issues that they can investigate during the semester. “I want students to do more than sit on the sidelines,” she said. “I want them to roll up their sleeves and get to work.”

The courses Walker develops and teaches at Brown—particularly PHP1720: Environmental Exposure Assessments in Practice—emphasize local, bottom-up and community-engaged research that measures the impact of environmental contaminants on human health and well-being.

This year, the undergraduate, master’s and doctoral students of PHP1720 designed projects around the idea of “environmental comfort,” or the sense of well-being that arises when environmental conditions stay within the ranges that we perceive as desirable. Since the start of the Fall semester, students have been working at 180 sites across Rhode Island, collecting quantitative and qualitative data on air quality, temperature, and noise and light pollution. These measures will help inform the Environmental Comfort Index, which is being developed by Walker and her team at the Community Noise Lab.

To honor the course’s commitment to community engagement, students chose to present their findings at a community meeting at the Providence Public Library, gratifying attendees who said it allowed them to walk to the event. The projects ranged from assessing environmental comfort near liquor stores, laundromats, public parks and at busy landmarks, like Thayer Street, downtown Providence and the new soccer stadium in Pawtucket.

“ This course provided us with the unique opportunity to translate the methods we learned into practice across the greater Providence area and to then share our results in a meaningful way. ”

Ella Abourjaily GS MPH student

While results varied widely and did not always follow socioeconomic patterns, noise levels proved to be a recurring issue in the studies, with higher levels recorded in more congested, and often less affluent, neighborhoods. In the Environmental Comfort Index survey, the top concerns cited were noise pollution, humidity and light pollution, in that order. Noise pollution alone poses a meaningful public health risk, as it is linked to cardiovascular stress, hypertension and cognitive impairment.

Brown doctoral candidate Katherine Dunham, who assessed conditions around the Pawtucket soccer stadium, discovered that most of the noise stems from road traffic and could be mitigated by increased use of shuttle buses, which run frequently during stadium events.

“I was totally unfamiliar with the concept of ‘environmental comfort’ before this semester but, through the course, was able to learn all about it in the context of my own neighborhood in Pawtucket,” said Dunham. “I'm really grateful that Dr. Walker gave us the opportunity and support to do a research project from soup to nuts: coming up with a research question that mattered to us, doing our own data collection, analyzing our own data, and communicating our results back out to a wider audience.”

MPH student Ella Abourjaily focused her project on downtown Providence, finding greater environmental comfort on weekends compared to weekdays, and a correlation between higher median income with lower levels of noise and concentrations of total volatile organic compounds.

“This course provided us with the unique opportunity to translate the methods we learned into practice across the greater Providence area and to then share our results in a meaningful way,” Abourjaily said. “I greatly valued the community-engaged research approach that we centered while doing so, starting with a community-identified need and ending with a final product designed with input from the community, for the community.”

Next year, students of Mississippi’s Meridian, Copiah-Lincoln and Itawamba Community Colleges will collect data for a comfort index specific to their communities. This will happen in parallel with Brown students collecting data on environmental comfort in rural settings, which will take place in Walker’s course, PHP1725: Rural Public Health, this coming spring. “We will focus on rural environmental comfort and challenges to those comforts, including the proliferation of data centers,” Walker said.

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