A new research center led by Texas A&M transportation experts aims to weigh in on the effect vehicle emissions have on public health.

Those involved in the center, which received federal approval in December and is beginning to collaborate across college campuses, said scholarship merging medicine and mobility is limited.

“We have worked in isolation,” said Joe Zietsman, head of the Texas A&M Transportation Institute’s environment and air quality division. “We have to be honest that we have not worked in an integrated way.”

The Center for Advancing Research in Transportation Emissions, Energy and Health is meant to bring together transportation and health experts, in the hopes of better understanding what emitting exhaust causes in terms of medical complications and long-term effects.

Though much is known about the harmful effects of vehicle exhaust on air quality and public health, Zietsman said researchers hope to go deeper into exactly what the various chemicals do to children, adults and subsets of the population.

“You have a whole host of materials in emissions,” Zietsman said. “We need to start understanding what they each do to human health.”

He noted researchers are exploring the effect of emissions on pregnant women in South Texas, for example, something that requires scientists understanding emissions and proper public health research. Various groups are also looking at what new fuel sources could potentially lower emissions and the possible health improvements that could come from those changes.

All of those changes have profound environmental and economic effects.

The center could also help devise new ways to consider who is and is not exposed to bad air, Zietsman said.

“We work with this issue of conformity,” he explained, noting the eight-county Houston region is a non-attainment area, meaning the whole region does not meet federal air quality standards. “The theory there is all those people are exposed to bad air, but some people in the region might not have bad air while of course many people do.”

Meanwhile, Zietsman added, “folks not living in a non-attainment area could be exposed to bad air from a factory or something nearby.”

The center, funded over five years with $11 million from the U.S. Department of Transportation, is one of 32 university transportation centers established across a host of disciplines. The centers were funded with a combined $300 million grant to address what federal officials called “critical transportation challenges.”

Joining TTI in the emissions and public health research is Johns Hopkins University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Texas at El Paso, and the University of California, Riverside.

Riverside, outside Los Angeles, shares many similarities with Houston. Both have grown rapidly over the past 15 years and rely heavily on freeways for daily commutes and the movement of goods. The university’s Center for Environmental Research and Technology has studied emissions and ways to reduce fuel consumption by avoiding traffic delays and limiting sudden acceleration.

“Southern California suffers from some of the worst traffic congestion and air pollution issues in the nation, so we are ideally placed to study the connection between transportation emissions and public health and try to make positive impacts,” said Kanok Boriboonsomsin, associate research engineer at UC Riverside, who will lead the college’s collaboration with TTI.

In some communities, the adverse effects of emissions have been especially harsh on low-income and minority communities where decisions made years ago allowed for widened freeways in highly residential areas.

Researchers at Rice University, unaffiliated with the transportation center, released findings on Feb. 28 that showed a racial and economic disparity in childhood asthma rates in Houston.

Compared to white children in the same neighborhoods, blacks in Houston were 8.8 percent more likely to have asthma in poor neighborhoods, 6.7 percent more likely in middle-class neighborhoods and 5.8 percent more likely in affluent communities, Rice sociologists concluded. Children in poor neighborhoods, regardless of race, were twice as likely to have asthma, compared to youngsters in affluent neighborhoods.

Researcher said a host of factors could cause the disparity – among them that affluent children might have more opportunity to play inside and not be exposed to bad air, or highly-educated educated parents might have more likelihood of monitoring air quality.

Still, lead researcher Ashley Kranjac said the reasons show a troubling pattern.

“The drivers of those differences are not likely physiological but rooted in social and racial inequalities,” Kranjac said in a release.