Photo credit: Lauren Minsky, 2024.
Research you can trust to protect your community’s health
At Teratai, we don’t dismiss or discount your lived experiences and concerns. We know that industries and regulators downplay the health costs of pollution, while blaming your family’s genetics, lifestyle choices, and even accelerated aging. Powerful interests make it extremely hard to get honest answers. Teratai is committed to making industrial anthropogenic environments and biologies visible, legible, and actionable. We partner with you to get needed answers for your community, and to communicate significant information with key policymakers and stakeholders.
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Services
for our select
non-profit partners
Photo credit: Lauren Minsky, 2024.
Custom community pollution, toxic exposure, cumulative impact, and population health reports, maps and public presentations.
Photo credit: Mladen Antonov/AFP-Getty Images
Our acclaimed, signature tool PCIST, which provides local cancer incidence reports, maps, educational materials and presentations for your community.
Photo credit: Lauren Minsky, 2026.
Written and oral testimony for state & local government zoning and permitting decisions, from longstanding industries to data centers.
Photo credit: Lauren Minsky, 2025.
Tailored studies that address dynamic real-world circumstances, including topography, inversions, winds, heat islands, floods, fires and more.
Photo credit: Fiona Pando, 2025.
Teratai has your back
Teratai partners with non-profit organizations to untangle the purposefully obscured links between environmental pollution and disease. We only accept partnerships with community non-profit organizations whose public-serving environmental health missions we firmly endorse. In turn, we provide our scientific and social scientific work at a significantly discounted, at-cost price, because our time should not be worth more than yours. Our focus is on you: your organization, community, local knowledge, questions, needs and priorities. We work by hand — intentionally side-stepping problematic assumptions and algorithms — to design research tools and studies, customize and interpret datasets, and translate findings into reports, maps and testimony that concretely support the fight for your community’s wellness.
Teratai’s Green Chemistry
Teratai, and its signature collaborative research project PCIST, has a growing network of exceptional environmental health non-profit partners and collaborators. 
Teratai’s Executive Director, Dr. Lauren Minsky, has her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. She previously worked in a pediatric cancer lab at Penn, and was employed for many years as a history/environmental health studies professor at NC State, NYU and Haverford. Dr. Minsky currently serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of Physicians for Social Responsibility-PA and previously served on the Editorial Board of the journal Medical History. She has several peer-reviewed cancer research and environmental health history publications. Her original research has been supported by Fulbright, the Social Science Research Council, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, among others. 
Executive Director Dr. Lauren Minsky presents original PCIST community cancer incidence data, and links it to oil- and gas-industry exposures, at a conference on Public Health and Shale Gas, convened by Physicians for Social Responsibility-PA at Duquesne University in February 2026. 
Dr. Minsky regularly presents testimony and comments before environmental protection and local and state governmental hearings. Here she speaks about a proposed LNG export facility in Eddystone before the PA State House Committee of Environmental and Natural Resource Protection in November 2025. Much of Teratai’s current work preparing testimonies focuses on fossil fuel facilities, data centers and waste facilities (both landfills and incinerators). Teratai provides community cancer incidence education in relation to environmental pollutant exposures. Here Dr. Minsky speaks at a “Let Us Breathe” event organized by CRCQL (Chester Residents Concerned with Quality Living) in Chester, PA in 2025. A research partnership on cancer incidence between Dr. Minsky and CRCQL — and its longstanding leader Zulene Mayfield — is what first led to the creation of PCIST (The People’s Cancer Incidence Screening Tool). 
Jane Cleary, Carolyn Steglich, Lisa Stern and Jen Michel of CEASRA collaborate with Lauren Minsky on designing cancer incidence maps for community education 
Members of Teratai’s signature PCIST research team, including RAs Sevilla Kent (back left) and Lucy Spellmeyer (middle right), enjoy a church fish fry during an environmental health trip in Washington county led by resident expert Ron Gulla (front left) in February 2026. Teratai appreciates that community health conditions are contextual and deeply respects local experiential knowledge. 
Teratai’s Executive Director has over two decades of experience in environmental health education and leads environmental health field trips, tours and trainings for college students and community residents. Here college students Sriya Krishnan, Alexandra Lederman and Sara Almo explain the history, workings, and emissions of the enormous natural gas liquids export plant in Marcus Hook, PA for a documentary class project produced by fellow student Fiona Pando. 
Selective, mentored internships are available with Teratai. These opportunities connect college students and recent graduates with real-world experience in dignity-based, community-engaged research, outreach, and state and local government regulatory and zoning hearings. Here members of PCIST’s research team — Alice Sappenfield, Savannah Shaw and Shaina Maitra — attend a township data center hearing at which Dr. Minsky was asked to testify. Email terataipartnership@pm.me to inquire.
Teratai is the Malay word for the lotus plant. The Pink lotus, known as the “supreme lotus” of Buddha and widely revered throughout Asia, represents enlightenment and universal compassion. Rising from muddy waters and surviving inhospitable conditions, the pink lotus also symbolizes resilience, rebirth, and a soul’s journey towards awakening. The lotus has spongy tissue in its stems that allow oxygen to reach roots in submerged, low-oxygen swampy environments. 
The rare Purple lotus symbolizes the many paths to enlightenment. Lotuses spread vigorously through their thick and supportive underground stems called rhizomes. Like all other lotuses, its many parts — from rhizomes to stalk, leaves and seeds — are edible, richly nutritious, and an invaluable source of sustenance for many. 
The Red lotus represents love, passion and selflessness. As with all lotus plants, it is widely respected for its medicinal properties. Lab analyses demonstrate that the lotus contains alkaloids with anti-inflammatory and anti-oncogenic properties, inducing cell death in forms of breast, colon and lung cancers and osteosarcomas; repressing estrogen receptor expression in breast cancer; and inhibiting tumor formation and metastasis more broadly. 
The white lotus is regarded as the “womb of the world” and represents purity and freedom from suffering. All lotus plants have extensive rhizome root systems that purify water by extracting heavy metals, radioactive particles, ammonia, nitrogen, phosphorus and suspended solids. As such, they play an important role in cleaning aquatic environments of toxic contaminants. 
The Yellow lotus – known as tsewae (tse’-wa-the) among the Osage people – is the only lotus species native to the Americas. Like all lotus plants, it is renowned for having leaves that are exceptionally hydrophobic, with micro-structures that repel water. The lotus is also rare in its capacity for physiological thermoregulation via biochemical feedback and alternate pathway cellular respiration. Its flowers act like warm-blooded animals and serve as important sources of pollen and refuge for cold-blooded insect pollinators. 
The Blue “Egyptian” lotus is found throughout most of east Africa, including along the Nile river, and in parts of southern Arabia. It has long been eaten raw and in curries, as well as used for aromatherapy. The blue lotus contains the psychoactive alkaloids nuciferine and apomorphine, and has a long history of use to produce feelings of euphoria and tranquility.
Collective insights and solidarity
Teratai’s research updates, guest perspectives, and recommended reads on what is needed to survive, and even thrive, in such environmentally challenging times.
Contact us
terataipartnership@pm.me