Marti Lindsey, MA, MLS, ABD Director
520-626-3692
lindsey@pharmacy.arizona.edu

Marti Lindsey, MA, MLS, Outreach director for the Southwest Environmental Health Sciences Center

College of Pharmacy Highlight

As outreach director of the Southwest Environmental Health Sciences Center (SWEHSC), part of the Center for Toxicology at the College of Pharmacy, Marti Lindsey directs projects that echo her personal and professional interests.

Lindsey is involved with a number of outreach projects for SWEHSC: she promotes environmental health in American Indian communities, recruits and places high school students in a summer research internship program with The University of Arizona, teaches a classfor pharmacy students on health literacy, and works on web projects, recording environmental health research and outreach areas.

"Every day is different," Lindsey says. "The tasks I do range from making Web sites, giving lectures, coordinating events with the community and SWEHSC partners, creating information displays and writing reports. I travel more than half my time on behalf of the College of Pharmacy."

In everything she does, she explores the mismatch between the reading level of most Americans and the health materials they need to understand.

Lindsey is also raising awareness of health literacy for student pharmacists through the class she teaches - PCOL 819: Health Literacy - which gives students the opportunity to teach in science classes.

"Marti does a great job of motivating us," says Justin H. Clark, class of 2012 and one of her students. “Just because someone can read does not mean he is able to decipher a pamphlet on health or medicine"

Lindsey also works with the Environmental Protection Agency to help American Indian tribes understand the health effects of environmental contaminants.

In October, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences invited Lindsey to speak at their Annual Environmental Health Sciences Core Centers Meeting about her work with American Indians. The center specifically contacted her for her expertise that comes from living and working in an Indian community.

"I have a personal interest as well as an academic understanding," says Lindsey, who lived on a Navajo Reservation for six years and is married to a Cherokee Indian. "They chose me because they felt I could give them principles to operate on - real academic principles that can be translated into better research."

Lindsey has worked in several different fields over the course of her career: she has been a high school librarian, the president of her own consulting services, an English conversation teacher at a day school in Japan and even a psychiatric social worker in the geriatric unit of a hospital.

When she has free time, she enjoys hiking in the desert with her dogs and reading mystery novels.

"I think I am grateful for my job because I already appreciate the natural world," she says. "I think that comes from spending many years with Indians and having spent so much time in Japan. There's an appreciation for beauty there that's remarkable. I think there's a connection amongst it all."