Area professors get $3-million grant to study the health of Mary Ellen McCormack residents as their development is rebuilt into a mixed-income complex

A squad of researchers astatine Boston College, Boston University and Harvard person won the national grant to survey "how the monolithic makeover volition impact the wellness and well-being of much than 1,000 children and adults" who unrecorded successful the state's oldest public-housing complex.

WinnCompanies has the BHA motion to replace the existent buildings with each caller buildings that volition see some caller public-housing units and apartments aimed astatine radical who tin spend marketplace rates, astatine a full outgo of $2.3 cardinal implicit 15 years. It's a strategy the BHA has utilized successful caller years to regenerate aging public-housing units astatine a clip erstwhile the national authorities nary longer puts immoderate wealth into specified housing.

A squad of societal workers, developmental psychologists, engineers and biostatisticians, headed by module astatine BC's Lynch School of Education and Human Development and School of Social Work:

Will survey and interrogation residents of the Mary Ellen McCormack nationalist lodging analyzable astatine regular intervals implicit the adjacent 5 years. The squad volition besides measurement biology conditions successful the vicinity specified arsenic aerial quality; stitchery information from section and nationalist sources similar the U.S. Census and the Boston Police Department; and cod hairsbreadth samples from residents to way levels of cortisol, a hormone that is associated with stress.

The researchers volition enactment intimately with the Mary Ellen McCormack Resident Task Force to signifier the questions they inquire and the methods they usage to enlistee residents, said Samantha Teixeira, an adjunct prof successful the School of Social Work who is moving the survey with Rebekah Levine Coley, a prof successful the Lynch School.