When Chris van Bergen, the executive director of Public Exchange at Washington University, encountered USC’s CLEAN project, a project that addresses fears of toxins after the Los Angeles area wildfires, he realized that residents of St. Louis were left with those same concerns after a deadly tornado in May.

The CLEAN project is part of USC’s Public Exchange program, which started in 2020 to connect University research to societal issues like homelessness and food insecurity. After his visit, WashU in St. Louis became the first institution to develop its own Public Exchange program in October. The partnership will allow the universities to collaborate closely on shared research goals.

Kate Weber, executive director of Public Exchange at USC, said one reason the program was considering a network was due to gaps in faculty expertise in projects such as the California Solar Canal Initiative. In that case, they found faculty at six different universities to collaborate on the project.

“That got us to thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if there were other teams like ours at other universities that we could just call?’” Weber said. “That’s a lot easier than just Googling and trying to find, through the internet, the right person.”

Weber said that the Public Exchange network will expand to be a group of partnering universities focusing on their community’s needs. Each member of the network would be able to share information with one another and collaborate on Public Exchange projects.

USC’s Public Exchange has worked on projects like water conservation in Santa Clarita and creating shaded spaces in L.A. So far, Public Exchange at WashU only has the CLEAN project in its portfolio — a project that involves soil testing for lead and air quality testing. Josh West, a professor of earth sciences and environmental studies and a faculty lead in USC’s CLEAN project, said lead is a concern due to the use of lead paint in older buildings.

“There [are] also other uses of lead, like leaded pipes, leaded gasoline,” West said. “All that stuff is mobilized by the fires, where it would have just been sitting there, inaccessible, not posing an exposure risk prior.”

Van Bergen said WashU’s CLEAN project highlights the strength of having a Public Exchange network, as it could take advantage of the existing knowledge from USC experts working on USC’s CLEAN project on matters like communicating the results of lead testing to the public.

“The USC team already had to figure that out,” van Bergen said. “We can leapfrog over all that time and say, ‘You know what? We can actually start this project right now.’”

Although L.A. and St. Louis are different cities, van Bergen said they face similar societal challenges. He said the WashU expansion is a chance to prove the same model of Public Exchange could work in a different context.

“​​Our demographic makeup looks very different than Southern California[’s] does,” van Bergen said. “The politics here are a little different. So in that regard, it’s different. But the exciting thing for me, frankly, in this first project out of the gate, is a clear representation that we are trying to tackle very similar problems.”

Van Bergen said he hopes to see several projects under WashU’s Public Exchange by the end of the academic year. He said he is considering projects touching on economic mobility, homelessness, nutrition and other issues affecting St. Louis. 

After the WashU expansion, Weber said that Public Exchange is looking to expand its network to other universities interested in connecting researchers to societal issues.

“It’s us and WashU together who are having those conversations,” Weber said. “It’s important to us that universities [that] join the network have a commitment to social impact and strong leadership support to build a Public Exchange at their university.”