 So I first learned about environmental justice in 1994, second year graduate student, when quite a bit of media attention was focused on a report that was published that described how non-whites were three times as likely to live in a zip code with a landfill than without a landfill. And as a graduate student studying public policy and the environmental policy in particular, this was, you know, groundbreaking news, big news. It obviously came up in our classes and we started a conversation around it with professors and my peers, other PhD students, and eventually a group of us led by some of our professors decided to write a proposal to try to get money to support research to help us better understand the problem of environmental justice. And so we started working on a proposal probably, and we went through several iterations and five years later we finally got a grant to study social vulnerability and toxic hazards. You know, there were several important questions that kind of framed that grant about the scale of toxic exposures but also not all pollution is created equally. So another part of our question was to look at the riskier kinds of chemicals and riskier emissions that were being released into the environment. And then finally creating an index of risks that those kind of three issues and three questions have really driven a research program and my teaching and the collaborations with students ever since. That span of time as a graduate student it was, and in focusing on the environment, it was the biggest controversy, biggest story, biggest challenge that many environmental professionals were grappling with at the time. And so it was in a formative moment for me as a doctoral student but then it helped me remember a moment college as an undergraduate that I'd written about for a class. I was an undergraduate working on my bachelor of science in public health and my concentration was environmental health. But we had to do a practicum and that practicum is like an internship where you had to do environmental health related work. So I actually got a job working for a safety engineer at Stuart Warner Southwind Manufacturing. Pretty large facility in southern Indianapolis and it was being shuttered to be replaced by a newer plant in the southern part of the state. And so there were lots of parts of this big facility that were basically abandoned. And my job was to go around and find unlabeled 55 gallon drums. It was kind of a well-lit industrial shop of horrors. Unlabeled chemical powders, drums of hazardous waste that I had to sample and send off to be tested and identified. But there was one part of the plant that was still running. But one day when I parted the kind of industrial sized refrigeration curtains, my upper respiratory system went into full alert. My eyes were watering, my nose burning, and I could taste acid on my mouth. And there was clearly something going wrong in the operation. I yelled above the industrial noise that they needed to get out or something wrong, evacuate the line. And you know I'm a 20 year old unpaid intern telling you know professionals, plant workers what they should do and they fortunately they listened. But as they kind of walked by me single file through that opening and those those kind of floor-to-ceiling curtains it I noticed they were all African-American. And as one of them walked past me he really looked me in the eye and I can remember that you know like it was yesterday because he asked me where were you 20 years ago. And as I kind of remembered that moment in the 90s and as I started thinking about this challenge of environmental justice it I began to realize that I saw environmental justice that day in Indiana but I didn't even know it. My training didn't prepare me to recognize it. It's definitely still happening today and I can see it and that the students I work with can still see it so it's it's still here still a problem we're still fighting for environmental justice.