SWEHSC Summer Programs Highlight

This summer, the Southwest Environmental Health Sciences Center played host to four different programs aimed at local Arizona middle and high school students. Thank you to all the community partners that made this possible! 

One SWEHSC summer program is the Steps 2 STEM (S2S) program. This program is aimed at getting Tucson high school students into a research lab for the first time. In 2026, we hosted a cohort of 20 students in total. Over the course of 5 weeks, these students worked in host labs across the U of A campus. They participated in research, developed their own research project, and put together a poster presentation of their research with the help of a graduate mentor. 

This was also a unique year thanks to Kaela Castro, our student worker who was also a S2S alum from a few years ago. She not only helped with the overall delivery of the programs, but spoke on her experience with the program, sharing details on her lab experience and her experience as an undergraduate student studying biomedical engineering. 

At the end of the program, these students went on to present these posters at a showcase event, garnering over 100 attendees. According to Lance Tubinaghtewa, SWEHSC Program Coordinator, the students performed “really well on their poster presentations and were very well articulated on subjects relevant to [them].” 

The second program to take place over the summer was Toxic Detectives, uniquely aimed at providing opportunities to local middle schoolers to get hands on with the environment surrounding them. Throughout the week, students had the chance to explore the U of A campus, learn from presenters, and completed group experiments. These experiments tested soil, water, and air samples across campus, as well as studied the “dose makes the poison” principle with radish seeds. The program focused on hands-on activities but welcomed knowledgeable speakers on a variety of environmental health topics. A notable speaker included Dr. Rob Root from the U of A’s Arizona Laboratory for Emerging Contaminants. He spoke on some of the work he’s done as a researcher and even demonstrated how an X-ray Fluorescence (XRF) machine can be used to find out what composition of elements and substances an object contains. The students used this XRF machine to test soil samples, even finding that many of the green lamp posts around campus have very high levels of lead in the bases! 

At the end of the week, the students worked together to develop a poster summarizing the findings of their research project, which they shared with their parents at an end-of-camp presentation. It was an opportunity to share what they learned while becoming familiar with the concept of academic posters and public speaking.

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The Environmental Scholars program was a unique collaboration between SWEHSC and the Upward Bound program, an evidence-based program that provides students social and academic capital, building support to aid in their transition from high school into college. We hosted a cohort of 12 high school students from across Tucson for a week within their summer-long Upward Bound program. They not only got to meet excellent guest speakers and explore resources available to them as future U of A students but were also given a crash course into environmental health issues and community-scale thinking. 
 
Over the course of a week, students were able to research local issues relevant to them as Tucsonans. Issues varied and included topics such as PFAS contamination, expanding green spaces, clean exhaust filter initiatives, and more. With the help of Sofia Forier-Montes, Associate Director of the SWEHSC Community Engagement Core, they were able to write grant proposals for their topics of choice, ultimately presenting them at the 2026 Upward Bound showcase. This is incredibly advanced training, which helps them understand the many pieces required to address complicated issues in our communities.  
 
In between writing and researching, students were able to visit on-campus resources like the U of A THINKTank and speak with representatives from the Watershed Management Group about data centers and other issues relevant to Tucson’s environmental health. This  helped inform their grant proposals, giving them the confidence to address community-wide issues with community-wide solutions. 

Once the week was over and grant proposals were finished, our cohort of students completed the rest of their Upward Bound program, bringing with them the experiences and knowledge gained during Environmental Scholars. 

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To finish off the summer, SWEHSC hosted the Our Land, Our Education, and Our Health (OLEH) program in collaboration with the Gila River Indian Community, Hopi Tribe, Pascua Yaqui Tribe, and Tohono O’odham Nation, inviting 9 students from them in total. During the two weeks, participants got to live on the U of A campus and learn about campus and student life. 
 
 Similar to the Environmental Scholars program, students were asked to research topics relevant to them and write grant proposals with the help of SWEHSC staff members, creating academic poster presentations and presenting them at the end of the program. Guests visited the students throughout out the program to speak on different health issues such as pandemics, Trichloroethylene (TCE) contamination, and more. SWEHSC worked hard to prioritize Native professionals and speakers, ensuring students learned of the important work being done within and by their communities. 
 
Students were able to visit the Borderlands Restoration Network, learn about Hopi agriculture and how it ties to environmental health, and create keychains at the UA Catalyst Studios. Lance Tubinaghtewa said of the program that “bringing Indigenous youth to a higher education institution and allowing them to research environmental health issues in their community is by far one of the most valuable experiences we can offer them. Seeing their heart and intrigue drive their research was inspiring knowing that even in such youthful years, they prioritize their communities and peoples." 

OLEH is unique in the way that it incorporates independence and community into its curriculum. For many of the OLEH participants, this was their first time spending an extended period of time away from home and likely their first time truly being independent, even if only for 2 weeks. Taking that into consideration, the program sought to expose them to different parts of college life and get them accustomed to what life might be away from home. Students were able to explore on -campus resources like the Indigenous Teacher Education Project (ITEP), the Indigenous Resilience Center (IRes), and attend social nights to not only build a sense of community but also give them the confidence that they can succeed as Indigenous youth on the U of A campus. 
 

At the end of program, the students presented their completed grant proposals at a showcase with over 40 attendees from the U of A, the surrounding Tucson area, and partnering groups. Students stood in front of their posters and presented their ideas to attendees, which included Pascua Yaqui Council woman Herminia Frias. We are grateful that our attendees were so engaged and asked so many questions – it gave the students an opportunity to shine as they explained their proposals and thought processes. Jordania Livingston, SWEHSC Program Coordinator, said that “our team really worked with the students to be confident in their posters and learning the curriculum, [and] it was so rewarding to see all the students' posters and listen in on them presenting to their family and friends.” 

Thank you to all guest speakers, site hosts, and program partners that make these program possible! Without your support, we could not offer such a thorough and positive curriculum. If you would like to be involved in our programs next summer, please reach out to us a SWEHSC-CEC@arizona.edu. We would love to discuss how we can collaborate! 

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