Q&A: Dr. Camellia Okpodu, Norfolk State University
Dr. Camellia Okpodu, Professor of Biology at Norfolk State University, worked on a cross-university project with Coastal Resilience Center of Excellence (CRC) project lead Old Dominion University as part of the Department of Homeland (DHS) Security Science & Technology Directorate-funded Summer Research Team exchange program. Dr. Okpodu spoke about the scope of her project, her past experience with coastal hazards and her hopes for future collaboration.
Q: Can you describe your summer project’s goals and if you felt they were achieved?
A: The whole concept was having a systems approach to look at the idea of sea level rise. We are trying to understand how minorities, particularly under-served and under-represented groups in this area, respond to sea level rise and coastal flooding. From a dataset working with the University of Virginia, one of the outcomes was that minorities, particularly African-Americans, have a low affinity for the environment. That troubles me as an African-American person who grew up in coastal North Carolina on a farm – that is not my experience.
I wanted to be able to look into this, so when the DHS funding came about, I decided instead of just working by myself this was a way to work across universities in a multi-disciplinary way and to have a social scientist and students from that area who were interested in crime and social justice issues. This is how Dr. Bernadette Holmes got invited to participate.
I wanted to take this questionnaire from the University of Connecticut, not just to compare directly with what he got but to ask additional questions. For example, one of the things I thought was culturally sensitive and I wanted to look at is that most minorities – people that are my age – we don’t refer to this area as Hampton Roads. We grew up calling this Tidewater or 757. One of the questions put on our survey is how they identify their area where they live.
Q: How would you describe the connection between the work you do in your home department and the coastal resilience realm?
A: I am primarily interested in the people of Portsmouth, Va. Portsmouth is an “economic empowerment area” – it’s about 96,000 people but they have a high rate of crime, high rate of asthma – this is primarily epidemiological data I could get. I was interested in those social indicators and finding out what we can do in the landscape from a biological aspect. Are there things we can do with dune plants for coastal restoration and mitigation? I worked on a long-term ecological project to learn about what types of plants we can add back. Rebuilding wetlands is very important for storm surge. We wanted to look into what could be done to the landscape on the basic level to help mitigate some of that. We already have some of that information, but we wanted to better identify the plants that would be most responsive and tolerant in that area. The Eastern Shore is very fertile for farmland, but as we have more flooding moving inland it’s not just us being affected. We are looking into whether there are epigenetic markers that we can see, expressed in the DNA of certain plants, that make them more flood-tolerant or stress-tolerant.
