MRI: Acquisition of a Shared Multi Collector Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer for Ocean, Earth, Environmental, and Geobiological Sciences in Southern California

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Metals are necessary to life on Earth, yet they can also be toxic. Measurement of metals has applications in geology, oceanography, ecology, environmental science, and medicine. The acquisition of a multiple collector-inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer, or MC-ICPMS, will enable new scientific discoveries in metals analysis to address major scientific questions across many scientific disciplines. This instrument will be housed at USC; users will include scientists within the university and at other academic institutions and government agencies in Southern California. The instrumentation will enable societally relevant research, increase opportunities for training students and early career researchers, enhance teaching and community engagement, and support governmental agencies in their mission. Life depends on elements from across the periodic table, and the availability of these elements to organisms is often controlled by geochemical processes. At the same time, some elements, especially metals, can be deadly environmental contaminants: some of the most widely known public health disasters have resulted from lead, mercury, and chromium poisoning. The multi-faceted functions of metals, and their perturbation due to human activities, make them compelling tracers of biological, environmental, marine, and Earth processes. While metals in the natural environment and the human body have been researched for decades, the capability to measure natural variability in their isotope ratios has emerged relatively recently, primarily since the early 2000s, and has transformed our understanding of many components of the Earth system. As the applications of metal isotope analysis spreads from the geosciences to fields such as medicine and environmental engineering, these chemical tools are poised to have a growing impact. Acquiring a Multiple Collector-Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer (MC-ICPMS) instrument at the University of Southern California (USC) would enable exciting new applications of isotopic analysis, taking advantage of the expertise and research interests of the principle investigators, coupled with a wide range of users spanning multiple disciplines and multiple institutions in the southern California region. Metals will be a major focus of attention, with elements from Li to U all serving as targets of interest for the insights that they can provide in research areas including oceanography, hydrology and paleobiology, as well as environmental health, medicine, and more. The proposed instrument will be a cornerstone of a new Southern California Center for Elemental and Isotopic Analysis, which will also encompass existing, complementary instrumentation. Novel application of MC-ICPMS technology will be enabled by (i) focusing on analysis of large-scale sample sets, (ii) widening the intellectual reach of MC-ICPMS techniques, including in areas such as human biology and public health, and (iii) serving a wide user base in southern California, particularly enabling novel and exploratory science that is not possible when researchers are relying on instruments at remote facilities. Broader impacts will include providing an instrument for training future leaders in the isotope sciences, enabling science for the public good by building research-education partnerships with government agencies, and offering a platform for developing new graduate-level curriculum.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.