Our Focus

Our research focuses on investigating the fate and transport of legacy and emerging contaminants in the environment, such as PBDEs, PCBs, PFASs, pharmaceuticals, endocrine disrupting chemicals, and engineered nanomaterials. Our students are directly involved in the development and applications of analytical methods using state-of-the-art instrumentation to study environmental chemistry, effects of antibiotics, pesticides, industrial chemicals, and other pollutants that are commonly found in soil and the aquatic systems.

Some of the questions we aim to answer include:

1.) How persistent and mobile are these chemicals in the environment?

2.) What are the most effective ways of treating these compounds in municipal wastewater and livestock wastes?

3.) How much of these chemicals bioaccumulate in plants, humans and wildlife?

4.) What effects do these chemical contaminants have on exposed organisms?

Analytical Chemistry plays a key role in our investigations to answer several fundamental questions in environmental chemistry. We rely on both target and non-target analysis using modern instruments such as liquid and gas chromatography coupled with low and high resolution mass spectrometry (LC/MS, GC/MS), inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP/MS), and flourine-19 nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (19F-NMR), in combination with biological assays to understand important environmental processes that will control pollution of our environment.