Project 4 Trainee Kyla Drewry Reflects on KC Donnelly Externship Experience
This past fall, Northeastern PhD candidate and PROTECT trainee Kyla Drewry contributed to Hurricane Helene disaster response through her NIEHS KC Donnelly externship. Over two months, Kyla worked with organizations and agencies like the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (NC DHHS), Catawba Riverkeeper, Yadkin Well Company, and North Carolina Ground Water Association on response programming and the development of user-focused educational materials, giving her firsthand experience working in an uncertain, post-disaster environment.
As a student in Dr. Kelsey Pieper’s lab, Kyla has regularly collaborated with organizations in North Carolina on water sampling and testing. Through that and other work in the Pieper lab, she became interested in transdisciplinary and translational research. Then, the KC Donnelly opportunity came around. “I knew I wanted to develop skills outside of the university, and I saw the KC Donnelly externship as an incredible opportunity to expand on some of the work I had been doing with North Carolina health departments in a more formal capacity,” she said.
Kyla and undergraduate student Cassidy King
Kyla’s externship was focused on providing educational tools, support, and data to local health departments and organizations in western North Carolina areas that were hit hard by Hurricane Helene in September 2024. One of those tools was a wellhead model to be distributed by local health departments to show residents how to disinfect and collect samples from their private wells that were damaged during the hurricane.
The model wellheads
Though the majority of Kyla’s externship was remote, this wellhead model was a user-centric tool, making it critical that she was consistently communicating and collaborating with the teams in North Carolina. Every morning, Kyla would meet with Wilson Mize, the NC DHHS’s Onsite Water Protection Branch Head, to discuss response progress on the ground as well as plans for the day. Kyla would then participate in emergency planning meetings with state and local health officials where she would hear how local health departments were envisioning using the proposed wellhead model. Then, she would integrate this feedback into the design, ensuring that the product would satisfy the training needs of the departments, and the education needs of residents. “The day-to-day was very representative of the nature of disaster response and emergency management,” she said, adding, “throughout this experience, I deepened my understanding of what a user-centric design entails and learned about the complexity of disaster response.”
Kyla’s experience culminated in a one-week visit to North Carolina to meet with local health department officials and distribute the model wellheads she helped design. During her meetings, she also got the chance to hear about people’s experiences following Hurricane Helene and why the hands-on tools and resources were so valuable for public education and health. “Providing multiple training formats can improve adoption behaviors, resulting in increased mitigation of exposure to waterborne contaminants,” she pointed out.
Damage in North Carolina (Credit: Getty Images)
In addition to being a great learning experience, Kyla also found her time in North Carolina to be incredibly humbling. “Having worked on projects involving drinking water quality after hurricanes in the past, meeting people impacted by these events and seeing the extent of devastation put a lot into perspective,” she said. Witnessing the devastation and loss felt by the community is something she will carry forward in her research career. “Understanding the role of researchers to aid in such situations – while recognizing the sensitivity to devastation must come first – is essential,” she said.
One of the challenges Kyla faced while in North Carolina was the day-to-day unpredictability that is inherent to post-disaster situations. Despite the difficulty that this uncertainty created, Kyla viewed it as a learning opportunity, embracing the situations that she could be pulled into at a moment’s notice. When traveling to Asheville, North Carolina to distribute the wellhead models, she was invited to participate in surface water and soil sampling efforts by Catawba Riverkeeper, giving her valuable first-hand field experience. During her meetings to distribute wellheads she was also invited to take part in other disaster response meetings, giving her a more detailed, inside look at the state’s efforts. Working with this many different people and organizations in an uncertain time was a challenge, but it taught Kyla a lot. “My KCD experiences emphasized the value of holistic decision-making, and the coordination and collaboration required to make that happen,” she said. She will take these values with her through her career. “I aspire to continue working on transdisciplinary teams on projects that positively address environmental issues and drinking water contamination in underserved communities,” she said.
North Carolina continues to recover from Hurricane Helene’s devastation, and Kyla continues to take part in the efforts. She established strong connections with environmental health officials in the state throughout her externship, which brought her further into response efforts. She is currently involved in discussions about sampling and the distribution of testing resources. She is also taking part in efforts to aggregate and visualize data into an accessible platform for health departments so that they can better assess the status of the state and their disaster response efforts.