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Marine biochemistry and atmospheric chemistry
The ocean and atmosphere form a complex system that has significant impacts on Earth’s climate. To improve our understanding of the mechanisms that govern the ocean-atmosphere system and to achieve more precise predictions regarding the system’s feedback to the changing climate, major efforts in observation, experimentation, and modeling are required. Within this scope, our main scientific questions of interest are:
Does sunlight-irradiated surface seawater produce organic carbon compounds that escape to the atmosphere?
Do climate-relevant organic compounds play key roles in microbial cycling of dissolved organic carbon in oceanic waters?
Are photochemical processes occurring in marine aerosols essential to the chemistry of the atmosphere over the oceans?
Our research combines elements of analytical chemistry, photochemistry, and remote sensing to study chemical species that represent relatively high chemical reactivity or large biogeochemical fluxes and exist at extremely low concentrations.
For chemical species of interest, the Zhu research group at ODU employs field observations and laboratory-based experiments to determine their concentrations as well as their production and loss through different biogeochemical pathways. We also use modeling to predict biogeochemical fluxes in natural environments.
Emerging contaminants and their environmental fate
Coastal regions face growing challenges from emerging contaminants including PFAS, tire-derived compounds, and other persistent organics that move through water, air, and sediments. In dynamic coastal systems, storms, tidal exchange, sea spray, and urban runoff can mobilize these contaminants, altering where they travel, how long they persist, and how people and ecosystems are exposed.
Our research at ODU focuses on understanding how these chemicals behave in dynamic coastal environments, with particular attention to the Hampton Roads and Chesapeake Bay region. We are interested in how storm events mobilize contaminants from sediments, transport them through stormwater systems, and even transfer them into the atmosphere as aerosol particles.
A central theme of our work is that many contaminants do not behave simply as dissolved chemicals. Instead, they accumulate at environmental interfaces. In these micro-environments chemical reactions can be faster and follow different pathways than in bulk water. Understanding these interface-driven processes is essential for predicting contaminant behavior during storms and other coastal disturbances.
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