Rajiv Bhatia | Cynthia Comerford | Lili Farhang | Megan Gaydos | Jennifer McLaughin | Megan Wier | Acknowledgements

Rajiv is the Director of Occupational and Environmental Health for the San Francisco Department of Public Health and is responsible for developing, implementing, and evaluating the City's environmental health policy. Under Dr. Bhatia's leadership, the Department has new initiatives that broaden the scope of environmental health and justice. These initiatives span issues ranging from land use and transportation planning to urban food systems and worker rights, and all efforts involve collaboration with public agencies, universities, and community organizations. As part of these initiatives the Department is developing, applying and evaluating new tools for interdisciplinary planning and health impact assessment (HIA), including the Healthy Development Measurement Tool and the Pedestrian Environmental Quality Index. Dr. Bhatia teaches a course on HIA at University of California at Berkeley. He is also an advisor to Sambhavna People's Health and Documentation Clinic and a member of the Health and Social Justice Committee for the National Association of County and City Health Officials.

Cynthia's work focuses on planning and developing public health programs and providing technical assistance to incorporate public health considerations into local planning decisions. Programmatic areas of focus include environmental policy, land use planning, transportation, open space, food security and spatial analysis. Cyndy's newest project is managing a community based transportation planning effort for Treasure Island. She is also working on the Eastern Neighborhoods Health Impact Assessment and has collaborated on the design of the Healthy Development Measurement Tool. Her research includes working on developing several pedestrian models which are aimed at translating environmental variables into a set of provisions crucial for a healthy pedestrian environment and developing a geographic sound propagation model to be used for emergency response planning. She also serves the Blue Greenway Task Force and the Open Space Task Force/Greenway Network.

Lili works with the Program on Health, Equity and Sustainability at the San Francisco Department of Public Health, focusing on the health and equity impacts of urban development. Specifically, Lili manages the Healthy Development Measurement Tool, an innovative and ground-breaking evidence-based practice to consider health in land use planning and decision-making. Prior to that, she coordinated the Eastern Neighborhoods Health Impact Assessment (ENCHIA), an 18-month collaborative, consensus-based process convened to assess the health benefits and burdens of development in several San Francisco neighborhoods. Through her work, Lili brings experience in understanding the relationships between the built environment and health, the application of health impact assessment methods, program and tools development, coalition and consensus-building and process facilitation. Prior to joining the Department, Lili worked on reproductive justice issues in New York City, focusing on reducing infant and maternal mortality and increasing contraceptive access.

Megan works with the Program on Health, Equity, and Sustainability (PHES) on various projects related to the social determinants of health. Working with others on the HDMT team, Megan supports development, maintenance, and applications of the Healthy Development Measurement Tool, specifically in the areas of public infrastructure and social cohesion. Megan also works with PHES staff to advance research, policies and interventions that promote and protect workers' rights and healthy working conditions, including the evaluation of a 3-year participatory research project with day laborers and local community-based organizations. Over the past year, Megan has also been serving as the SFDPH coordinator for screenings of the new documentary Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? (www.unnaturalcauses.org) Prior to her work with SFDPH, Megan worked on a number of health and social justice-related research and advocacy projects at various organizations including the Berkeley Media Studies Group, Physicians for Human Rights, and the Miriam Hospital-Immunology Department.

Jennifer works closely with several programs within the Environmental Health Section, including the Program on Health, Equity, and Sustainability (PHES). She provides assistance on HDMT neighborhood plan applications, specifically focusing on open space and food access. Jennifer also provides Geographic Information Systems (GIS) support for the HDMT and all other programs in Environmental Health. Within the HDMT, she is involved in the development of a Neighborhood Completeness indicator to evaluate existing key public and retail services throughout San Francisco neighborhoods to identify potential resource gaps. Jennifer also works on a community-based transportation project in Treasure Island, where her main involvement has been to help create a Bicycle Environmental Quality Index to assess and identify the current bicycle facility environment.

Megan's work focuses on developing and applying quantitative health impact assessment tools. As a member of the HDMT team, her efforts are concentrated on sustainable and safe transportation issues. Her recent research has included developing an area-level model to predict the number of vehicle-pedestrian injury collisions associated with environmental and demographic changes due to land use development in San Francisco. Megan previously worked on epidemiologic studies addressing health disparities and reproductive/family health issues including preterm birth, autism, and health care among the working poor in California. Before obtaining her MPH in Epidemiology and Biostatistics at UC Berkeley, Megan directed research, evaluation and quality improvement activities for teen pregnancy prevention and young family support programs at a New York City non-profit agency.

We would like to thank the Community Council of the Eastern Neighborhoods Community Health Impact Assessment for their generous commitment to the process and to the development of this Tool. We also thank the many former members of the SFDPH ENCHIA team for their contributions to various aspects of project design and implementation.