Established: September, 2004
Principal investigator: Kent Oestenstad, Ph.D
The Southeast Regional Academic Center (SE-RAC) for Environmental Public Health began operations in September, 2004. SE-RAC is housed within the Center for Community Health Resource Development in the School of Public Health at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). Kent Oestenstad, Ph.D, CIH, CSP is the project’s Principal Investigator. Dr. Oestenstad is an Associate Professor in the UAB Department of Environmental Health Sciences.
The Regional Academic Centers (RACs) were created by the National Center for Environmental Health at the CDC to develop an integrated national system for academic institutions (i.e., Schools of Public Health) to assist and support state and local health departments and tribal health agencies in the planning, implementing, and evaluating Environmental Public Health (EPH) services. In addition to UAB, four other schools of public health were chosen to develop the RAC network. These schools are located at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland; the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Washington in Seattle, and Loma Linda University in San Bernardino, California.
SE-RAC’s principal focus is on the members of the southeast region’s EPH workforce. Specific project activities include: (1) describing the current state of EPH services within each partner state/territory and the region as a whole; (2) enumerating the region’s EPH workforce; (3) assessing state/territory EPH departments’ needs for technical assistance and consultation; and (4) disseminating EPH workforce education and training materials.