Monica Ramirez-Andreotta

Monica Ramirez-Andreotta is Director of Project Harvest and an assistant professor of Soil, Water and Environmental Science (SWES) with a joint appointment in the College of Public Health at the University of Arizona (UA). She is responsible for trainings, recruiting promotoras in the rural communities, and reporting data back to participants, as well as overseeing the analysis and interpretation of the inorganic data (water, soil and plants). She is trained across various fields and is a transdisciplinary researcher in the purest sense. She received a B.A. degree in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, a B.A. degree in Studio Art (Photography), and a master’s of Public Administration from Columbia University. Dr. Ramirez-Andreotta’s research programs include developing a fundamental understanding of the fate and transport of contaminants in the environment, with a primary focus on plant-soil systems. In parallel, she is building citizen science programs to increase public participation in environmental health research, developing low cost environmental monitoring tools to improve exposure estimates, and designing effective risk communication and data report-back strategies to improve environmental health literacy. She has independently secured funding from the National Science Foundation, US Environmental Protection Agency, Arizona Department of Health Services, City of Tucson, Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to conduct research while building community-academic partnerships. Dr. Ramirez-Andreotta’s philosophy is that in order to successfully engage communities and students, it is essential to address critical environmental health problems identified by the community, and then work collaboratively through the problem-solving and research process.