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This dissertation consists of three essays each of which revolves around a group of environmental engineers/scientists who have a different vision of how science should be done and who are seeking to work side-by-side with non-scientific partners to find alternative pollution prevention strategies and technologies. Their goal is to address environmental and social problems by "democratizing" science and redefining expert-lay collaboration so as to involve all participants in the design and application of ecologically friendly technologies and pollution prevention strategies. These scientists and engineers, who call themselves the "Learning Alliance," reflect a trend that researchers in the area of the social study of science and technology call a shift from Mode 1 to Mode 2 science. The first essay focuses on how the Learning Alliance attempts to enact Mode 2 science. I present an ethnographic study that analyzes how the Learning Alliance goes about establishing the kind of collaboration with end-users on which their vision of science depends. I show that successful negotiations between the Learning Alliance and a particular corporate group of end-users with whom they were working took place only after a series of failed attempts. I argue that both the failures and the successful project they were finally able to establish, can be explained in terms of what Learning Alliance learned about the prerequisites for successful collaborations. More specifically, using social worlds theory and the concept of boundary objects, I make the case that only once effective boundary objects are found can lines of action between social actors in different social worlds be fit together. In the second essay I draw parallels between the emergence of a Mode 2 model of science and debates within sociology about the need to move towards a public sociology, that is, a sociology that is more socially engaged. I discuss how the demands of a more publicly oriented sociology presented itself as a dilemma in my own research and how this ultimately led to both a repositioning of myself as an analyst and a re-negotiated relationship with the Learning Alliance I was studying. The third essay serves as an example of the kind of product that can result when sociologists step outside of their role as detached observers of the groups they study and instead, collaborate with those groups in promoting their collective agendas. The essay is a paper I wrote together with a member of the Learning Alliance. The paper deals with the question of how to involve end-users in all phases of technological development within water and sanitation sectors. The paper builds on the trading zone metaphor frequently used in the sociology of science to explain expert-lay collaborative ventures. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Despite the growing need for mobility, the anthropogenic byproducts of transportation, construction, and other human activity within our built environments, such as air pollution and noise, are detrimental to human health. In the United States (US), environmental noise is a ubiquitous yet overlooked pollutant and source of physiological and psychological stress. Several studies have examined associations between environmental noise and health outcomes, particularly in Europe; however, an insufficient number of longitudinal studies have been conducted. Additionally, much of the research lacks individual-level data, sufficient adjustment for confounding, and the ability to establish temporality. With an increasing demographic shift of the US population to an older age profile, there is heightened imperative to examine new interventions to reduce chronic disease risk, specifically upstream factors associated with risk factors for cardiovascular disease (CVD) and dementia, at the population level. The objective of this dissertation was to investigate the potential effects of long-term environmental noise exposure on CVD and dementia-related outcomes in the US by leveraging data from nationwide (Nurses’ Health Studies, Chapter Two) and local (Chicago Health and Aging Project [CHAP], Chapters Three and Four) cohorts. In both cohorts, annual aircraft noise estimates obtained from the Aviation Environmental Design Tool were generated every five years from 1995 to 2015 and linked to participants’ geocoded addresses. In CHAP, annual community and road noise estimates were generated within the Chicago city boundaries from separate land-use regression and CadnaA noise propagation models, respectively, for the same period as our aircraft noise estimates (1995 to 2015). In Chapter Two, we examined associations of aircraft noise with CVD incidence, CVD mortality, and all-cause mortality in the nationwide Nurses’ Health Studies, consisting of two prospective cohorts of 121,700 (Nurses’ Health Study, NHS) and 116,686 (Nurses’ Health Study II, NHSII) female nurses followed over the past 40 years. Overall, we did not find associations of aircraft noise with our outcomes of interest, which may reflect the lack of variability estimated exposure, as only approximately 7% of individuals experiencing a CVD-related event or death were exposed to aircraft noise above 50 A-weighted decibels. In Chapter Three, we assessed the relations of various types of environmental noise (community, road, aircraft) with three blood biomarkers of neurodegeneration (total tau, t-tau; neurofilament light chain, Nf-L; and glial fibrillary acidic protein, GFAP) in CHAP, a local prospective cohort of older adults living in Chicago, Illinois. We observed weak adverse associations of community, road, and aircraft noise with t-tau and Nf-L, which suggest that noise may work directly through neuronal damage. With GFAP, we observed weak and imprecise protective relations with GFAP, which may indicate that astrocyte activation may not be a pathway in which noise impacts health. Lastly, in Chapter Four, we continued to use data from CHAP to quantify associations of each noise measure (community, road, aircraft) with baseline cognitive performance, cognitive decline, and Alzheimer’s dementia (AD) incidence. In this study, we operationalized cognitive level and decline using assessments of perceptual speed, episodic memory, and a global cognitive performance score. With community and road noise, we found associations between increasing noise level and worse performance on each cognitive domain at baseline; however, we did not observe any associations with cognitive decline. With aircraft noise, we found mixed associations with cognitive performance at baseline, in which we unexpectedly observed some increasing aircraft noise categories with better cognitive performance, particularly with episodic memory. Yet, higher exposure to aircraft noise corresponded to faster rate of cognitive decline over time, most notably among the highest (versus the lowest) exposure category. When examining each noise source with cumulative odds of AD, we found suggestive yet imprecise associations, indicating greater odds with increasing exposure. Overall, our results should be interpreted cautiously, as the confidence intervals for the estimates were wide, and estimates were not necessarily consistent across sources of noise exposure. Although many of the results consistent with no association, this dissertation adds to the sparse literature on noise and health in aging populations and establishes a foundation for developing research on these questions that is more robust. / 2026-05-10T00:00:00Z

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