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Anyone who knows Natalie Sampson knows one of her more endearing (and perhaps Midwestern) traits is her reluctance to be in the spotlight — even when the attention is obviously due. Whenever we interview her about her work, which often has some connection to grassroots community organizations, she is quick to play up others’ hard work and contributions and lower the volume on her own. So it’s unsurprising that it's been a little uncomfortable for Sampson since the Michigan Association of State Universities shared that she had been selected as one of three . The news wasn't even public yet and Sampson was already sweating whether the invitations for her allotted guest list of seven for the Lansing awards ceremony should include her colleagues. "I didn’t want to bug them — ask them to drive to Lansing. They’re busy!” Sampson says, laughing. Luckily, her longtime friend and collaborator, the straight-talking Associate Professor of Sociology Carmel Price, told her to get over it. "She was, like, ‘They’re going to be upset if you ��Dz�’t ask them.’”

Sampson’s aversion to attention is perhaps amplified a bit by the fact that, for much of her life, she’s not always been exactly comfortable in the world of academia. She says she definitely did not grow up with an eye on becoming an academic. Her father, who was an airline mechanic, and her mother, who was a customer service representative, grew up in an era where college degrees weren’t necessarily seen as prerequisites for solid, well-paying jobs. But both she and her older sister excelled in school, and their parents were huge cheerleaders when their daughters landed at the University of Michigan. In retrospect, Sampson sees it as a moment of generational transition in her own family — and one that also says something about the region. “My parents grew up at a time when it was Papa Ford and Papa Chevrolet, and people did quite well for a very long time without going to college,” Sampson says. “So for my family, this college thing was a different trajectory — especially because my sister studied sociology and I did environmental studies. I was lucky because my family was always very supportive. But I think there was this curiosity about what this would translate to.”

It took a little exploration during her undergraduate years at U-M to find her niche. Sampson says she gravitated to her major because she liked the outdoors, but not all of the coursework clicked: “I remember taking the woody plants class and memorizing all the different Latin names and the different kinds of acorns and thought, ‘Well, I’m definitely not going to be a conservationist,’” she says. However, through U-M’s , which is akin to UM-Dearborn’s Summer Undergraduate Research Experience, she found something that was a little more her speed. She got paired with a faculty member who was doing research around the health impacts of truck traffic on people living in neighborhoods near Detroit’s Ambassador Bridge. During her assignment, she got to talk with dozens of people in the neighborhood and witness some of the inner workings of grassroots community organizations. “I remember thinking, ‘This is research? If this is research, then I like research,’” she says.

It was indeed research — or a particular brand of research that was coming of age in the public health discipline at that time. Sampson says beginning in the late 1980s, some academics in the field were going through a bit of a what-is-it-all-for moment. There was an impulse to not simply use research to document, say, epidemiological trends, but to try to more deliberately use the data to actually improve, well, the public’s health. This sometimes meant interacting more directly with community organizations who were taking on big corporations or government agencies, or interrogating long-held assumptions about academic research, like the value or validity of “objectivity.” During her master’s program at Portland State University, Sampson got exposed to more examples of this kind of “action-oriented research.” During one of her internships, she collaborated closely with a small nonprofit that was working with residents on issues related to asthma. “I saw faculty listening to residents, and their experiences were shaping the research. I started to see, ‘Oh, this is how it works,’” she says.

Today, it’s easy to see the imprint of this approach on Sampson’s work. Along with Price and several partners, she co-created , the flagship program of which is a summer academy that teaches high school students to do things like air and water quality monitoring, and to understand how environmental health science can support policy work. She’s also been working with community organizations and other academics on a plain language initiative, which is pushing government agencies like the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy to use language that is understandable to everyday people, so they ��Dz�’t feel alienated from decision making processes. And a few years back, during the planning stages of the Gordie Howe International Bridge — a project that promised to bring a vast amount of truck traffic to a neighborhood already burdened by poor air quality — her team’s community health survey of residents in Southwest Detroit helped push the city and state to agree to a landmark $45 million community benefits package. That agreement included an unprecedented relocation program that provided some residents of Detroit’s Delray neighborhood with the option of moving to a renovated Detroit Land Bank home. In typical Sampson fashion, she’s quick to point out that, in her opinion, her work made an impact because the timing was right. “This result is 100% due to the fact that this group had been organizing for 10 or 20 years, but they took that data and used that to support their argument for this community benefits agreement,” she says. “At that moment, the data just fit into that story.” Now, she says, another group, which is trying to get the city to design truck routes that ��Dz�’t go through residential neighborhoods is using similar data that their community-academic teams are continuing to collect. The organizers’ work recently prompted .

That community organizations, who are good at community organizing, and academics, who are good at collecting and presenting data, could collaborate in practical ways to improve the public’s health is something that makes intuitive sense. But in practice, Sampson says it doesn’t always work smoothly. As she sees it, the key ingredient is trust: University researchers who aren’t from the community, and who might speak in technical jargon, are often greeted with a healthy degree of skepticism by local residents, who ��Dz�’t know how durable or broad their allyship is. Sampson says there were plenty of times early in her career where her status as an academic made her feel out of place in community meetings. But that has changed over time — and because of time. Trust, she says, is built through relationships, and relationships ��Dz�’t arise out of thin air. Nowadays, she rarely feels that kind of awkwardness, namely because she’s been working with the same communities for years, sometimes decades. “That’s one reason I feel like it’s been a blessing for me to come to UM-Dearborn. I got to come back and work with people that I worked with as an undergrad when I was 20 years old,” she says. “Simone Sagovac, who now runs the Southwest Detroit Community Benefits Coalition, I know I have a picture of us somewhere at some meeting and I’m 20 years old, and I have an eyebrow pierced, and I’m not dressed professionally. And now here we are, a couple decades later, and we’re older ladies, some of us with gray hair, still working together, still trying to collect the data, because there’s so much frickin’ work to do.”

In the classroom, Sampson is always nudging her students to think about the practical applications of environmental health science too. She says she’s benefited greatly from teaching the same two courses — Community Organizing and Introduction to Environmental Health — for years now, which has enabled her to continually refine the curriculum. One of her go-to assignments in her environmental health class is to ask each student to bring in their municipal drinking water quality report, which local utilities are required to provide to residents. It’s a simple but powerful prompt. For one, many students discover for the first time things about their drinking water that aren’t great. And even the sheer challenge of deciphering these technical reports reveals that government documents aren’t always presenting important scientific data in ways that are easily understood — which in turns, stunts residents’ abilities to push their public officials when there is a problem. And for many semesters in her community organizing course, it’s been a staple assignment for students to partner with community groups on practical projects, like a collaboration a few years ago where students helped a group in south Dearborn write a grant proposal to support their work around air quality. She also recently did something she thought she’d never do: create a textbook. It has a benign sounding name: “.” But the content, featuring contributions from a diverse range of leading voices in the field, is far edgier, emphasizing the broad scope of the discipline, including the community-based approaches that originally inspired her.

Now a couple decades into her own public health journey, Sampson senses she might be entering a moment of transition. She says it’s a little weird to look around and see that she’s now one of three senior faculty members in the Health and Human Services Department. One of her colleagues, who’s just a little younger than her, recently recoiled when she casually referred to them both as “middle age.” And she’s also increasingly interested in exploring other approaches in her quest to make environmental health science universally accessible, including ones that utilize the arts. She’s also feeling more of a generational divide in the classroom, especially the past few years. In particular, she’s observing an increasing reluctance of students to talk — “like, at all” —  in class, something she attributes a little bit to COVID, but mostly to the fact that young people’s lives are increasingly lived online. It’s something she can sort of relate to. “I never talked in class as an undergrad,” she says. “And I’m definitely sympathetic to students who are feeling anxiety about that. But many of them are going to be clinicians. A huge part of their jobs is going to be talking to people. So you have to practice. Definitely, one of my biggest priorities as an instructor is just creating any opportunity to make them talk.” 

She also tries to keep their spirits up. Public health can, frankly, be a depressing subject much of the time, and she does feel like younger generations are living with a different kind of weight on their shoulders as they realize most of their lives will be lived in the climate change era. During her periodic efforts to bring them up to speed on current events, she makes sure to find at least some good news from the world. And it’s now one of her standard assignments to challenge them to do something for their mental health. (This semester, they are listening to a playlist of songs, crowd-sourced from the class, that get them pumped up.) She concedes that this kind of positivity can sometimes be a “performance.” But it’s also something that keeps her own motor going. “It’s funny: Sometimes I feel like I’m just getting started. And some days I feel like I’m ready to retire!” she says. “But there are always opportunities to reinvent.”

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Story by Lou Blouin