Beneath the Surface: Health, Harm, and Hope

‍Sandra Edwards was born and raised in Houston's Fifth Ward, leaving the community at the age of 16 and returning in 2010 to help take care of her parents, after her father was diagnosed with cancer. She is a community leader, advocate, and Founder of Impact Justice, an organization that works towards social and environmental justice in Fifth Ward. She has worked at the Houston Health Department on lead clean up. She has also collaborated with scientists at Texas A&M on studies that mapped heavy metals and other environmental toxins in soil in Fifth Ward. She is founder of Impact Justice, the president of the Fifth Ward Civic Club, and also a member of the Community Advisory Group with the EPA.

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‍Dr. Denise Frazier is the Programming Director for Prospect New Orleans. She is an educator, musician, and interdisciplinary artist from Houston, who has lived and worked in New Orleans since 2002. She was a 2023-2024 MLK Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the assistant director of the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University, a place-based research Center that grants fellowships and organizes public programming, immersive experiences, and collective contemplation about the bioregion stretching from Texas to Florida and its connections with other regions around the world. Her research interests currently include the Gulf South and the Anthropocene, sound studies and the political, social, digital, natural, and built environments of the Gulf South and Circum-Caribbean. She is also the manager, co-founder and violinist/vocalist/percussionist of Les Cenelles, a string and technological interfacing ensemble that performs African Diasporic music through a prismatic lens that honors African and Indigenous ancestors and chronicles ecological realities.

‍Dr. Denae King is the Associate Director at The Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice housed in the Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs at Texas Southern University (TSU).  She works on interdisciplinary research projects for the HBCU-CBO Gulf Coast Equity Consortium, the Environmental Justice Data to Action Project, Building Civic Engagement During COVID, and the Houston Multi-Hazard Information Hub Project.  Her work focuses on environmental justice projects designed to address community-identified environmental health concerns in underserved people of color communities in Houston, Texas and in the Gulf Coast region. Dr. King’s additional interests include the role of neighborhood effects in the onset of disease in underserved areas and organizational community capacity building to address environmental and climate justice concerns.  

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‍Jaila Lewis is a 4th year PhD Candidate in Biochemistry at the University of Houston, at the Center of Nuclear Receptors and Cellular Signaling. Jaila grew up in Atlanta, Georgia and attended Mercer University in Macon, Georgia where she earned her degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 2021. At the University of Houston, she joined the Antunes Lab, where she has been trained as an immunoinformaticist to improve cancer immunotherapy design using innovative computational methods and immunology. She has written for and was awarded grants for her research, one of which is a pilot study of her thesis titled, “Improving Immunotherapy Design for Underrepresented Patients of Color,” which tackles the environmental injustices taking place in Houston’s historical 5^th Ward and Kashmere Gardens.

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‍Joetta Stevenson serves as the president of the Greater Fifth Ward Super Neighborhood #55 as well as an officer with the Fifth Ward Neighborhood Civic Club and Fair Housing and Neighborhood Rights (FHNR) group. She is a member of the Community Advisory Group with the EPA to oversee the current soil sampling initiative around the former creosote treatment yard. Additionally, she served for three years on the board of the state-wide community advocacy organization the Texas Organizing Project. Joetta is an active member of a historical Houston church and is highly involved in her community. She recently helped to get a permanent generator installed at the Kashmere Multiservice Center. She spoke at Metro Transit Authority Board meetings to advocate for revisions within the plan for the original mass transit system, approved in 2015. She continues to organize community volunteers to protect, empower, and better their neighborhoods.