Sadler Research Projects

I started this work while interning at the Genesee County Land Bank as a graduate student. The premise builds on the well-understood connections between well-maintained greenspaces and pro-social and healthy behaviors. I have worked with partners in Milwaukee as well as the University of Michigan’s Prevention Research Center on this topic and its links to crime prevention and health promotion. More recently, I have started working with a colleague in the Department of Forestry on an evaluation of the new state park in Flint.

I have been at the forefront of research documenting the impacts of ‘not just redlining’ on health. Many studies fixate on redlining as a historical determinant of contemporary patterns of disinvestment and decline in neighborhoods. My work expands that line of thinking to include additional historical and contemporary patterns that more proximately impacted neighborhoods, such as blockbusting, urban renewal, freeway construction, predatory lending, and so on. This work links these patterns to mental health, life course health, and aging. This is the core topic of my first MPI’d R01, from NIA.

I have done extensive research on the Flint Water Crisis from the very outset of media attention (including with the Pediatric Public Health Initiative and Flint Area Community Health and Environment Partnership). Initial topics were focused on built environment linkages of lead and Legionella exposure. More recently, I have continued to pursue lines of inquiry related to the social justice implications of attempting to right-size Flint’s infrastructure. This work has been hugely important to the Flint community for its direct relevance in shaping water crisis relief efforts.

Like STRAßE, the concept of health equity is central to most of my work. From 2016 to 2022 I also served as the Methodology Core Director of the Flint Center for Health Equity Solutions (a U54, from NIHMD). In that role, I worked with research and community partners to contextualize the built environment and lend methodological insights into other projects. The base data we compiled as part of this center has been central to a new line of research I have pursued examining the creation of multivariable built environment indices.

Building on my earlier work on food environments, I leveraged these tools to study how the distribution of on- and off-premise alcohol outlets differentially impacted neighborhoods. Linking this work with my early conceptualization of STRAßE (as noted above) was the focus of my first PI’d R21, from NIAAA. This work extended to evaluations of the Transform Baltimore policy, as well as Michigan-based work with the Genesee County Prevention Coalition and the Michigan Council to Reduce Underage Drinking.

As a function of my work in FCHES, I worked with partners to study growing and potential inequalities in the handling of the opioid epidemic. Flint continues to be disproportionately burdened, and access to services remains a barrier. I worked with colleagues on multiple strains of work around linking national data to local response efforts. The tools I have used to identify unhealthy environments related to food, housing, and alcohol have been leveraged in this work.

I routinely work on small projects with healthcare system partners, using my expertise in geographic information science to contextualize the built environment and add value to questions of broad importance to their systems. This has included papers on the clustering of bystander CPR, access to autism services, access to buprenorphine treatment, inequalities in pharmacy quality, COVID surveillance, health equity report cards, 911/EMS service evaluations, and pediatric behavioral medicine services.

Because of the direct connection between poverty and poor health, I have remained active in research on economic development with colleagues at multiple universities. Initially, this extended to efforts made by municipal officials to brand their communities in competing for investment. More recently, this entailed the creation of a prosperity risk index that explores the connections among municipal fragmentation, suburban sprawl, racial segregation, regional inequality, poverty, and regional indicators of economic prosperity and growth.