Environmental Fate of Emerging Contaminants

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My research seeks to provide the most relevant information on which emerging contaminants have the potential to cause impact and deleterious effects for human health and the environment. I focus on contaminants and problems for which my earlier work and the scientific literature shows the most potential for risks. I am always careful not to simply measure concentrations of contaminants but integrate more mechanistic studies of their behavior and environmental fate issues (transformation, bioavailability and transport), their impacts on biological systems and the means through which we can remediate or prevent the pollution. Because of the significant challenge in measuring the ultratrace levels of many of those contaminants, development of new methods and proper validation of such analytical chemistry methods are critical before their application to real world matrices. My focus will be on non-target analysis of emerging contaminants and their metabolites and by-products. I intend to expand and pursue the work on the analysis of an expanded range of cyanotoxins, expand the work on the analysis of PFOS. Evaluate the relative contribution of water and food to the exposure to cyanotoxins and PFOS; integrating the importance of metabolites, degradation by-products and the role of particulate-bound contaminants in drinking water and weighing the relative impacts and exposure coming from food vs. water. I have also just recently acquired a GC-HRMS Orbitrap system and will develop new methods for the less measured lipophilic PFOS, cyanotoxins and also integrate the use of the pyrolysis system for the analysis of plastic polymers in water, sediments, soil amendments and biological tissues. Analytical objectives: I plan to use HRAM-MS to further enhance our analytical capacity to do non-target analysis and develop methods to retrospectively question archived full-scan HRAM-MS to provide semi-quantitative estimates of concentrations. I seek to devellop procedures on how to best do the initial analysis for optimal data archiving value. I will also apply my expertise with LC-HRAM-MS to integrate analytical developments with HRAM-MS GC-Orbitrap methods.  We will also be able to use non-target GC analysis to seek out by-products of PFAS, pesticides and pharmaceutical residues that are difficult to analyse using LC. I also want to combine the GC-Orbitrap system with a pyrolysis interface to develop an expertise in my lab to target plastic polymers including degradation by-products. Environmental objectives:  I will focus on three issues; 1) bioaccumulation of PFOS into organisms; 2) bioaccumulation, transformation and transfer of cyanotoxins; 3) quantify trace levels of plastic polymers and their degradation by-products that occur in water. and other matrices