Environmental Science: Processes & Impacts blog

Professor Kristopher McNeill is a professor at ETH Zurich and chairs the Environmental Chemistry group where his research is focussed on environmental organic chemistry, with a particular emphasis on developing a molecular-level understanding of environmentally important processes.  His group have current projects on the fate of emerging contaminants, natural organic matter photochemistry, the environmental chemistry of proteins, and metal-mediated defluorination reactions.

His research covers the “Source, Transport and Fate” area of our scope, and his latest article in the journal is on developing a probe to investigate the production and fate of the OH^. radical in sunlit waters:

Terephthalate as a probe for photochemically generated hydroxyl radical
Sarah E. Page, William A. Arnold and Kristopher McNeill
DOI: 10.1039/C0EM00160K

We asked him what he thought would be a challenge for environmental chemists in the coming years:
“The challenge that environmental organic chemists face going into the future is that problems are moving out of our comfort zone of small, charge-neutral, hydrophobic molecules to large, polyfunctional, and/or less well-defined species. The rule book of how one approaches the environmental chemistry of things like biomacromolecules or carbon nanomaterials still needs to be written.”

View the profiles for the rest of the Editorial Board here.

Professor Liang-Hong Guo is a principal investigator and group leader at the Center for Eco-environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences. His current research interests include biosensors and bioassays for quantitative determination of environmental chemicals and chemical toxicity testing, interactions of environmental chemicals with biological molecules and their toxicological implications, and nanomaterials for water purification.

Professor Guo’s expertise covers the “Novel Analytical Tools and Measurement Technologies” area of our scope, and he of course thinks this will be an important development area for the future, “Newly developed research tools in the life science fields will gain popularity in the study of environmental toxicology. Nanotechnology-based devices for large-scale water purification will also be demonstrated“.

Professor Guo will also be providing regular updates on the latest environmental news from China, read his first two columns here:

News from China
Liang-Hong Guo
DOI: 10.1039/C1EM90044G

News from China
Liang-Hong Guo
DOI: 10.1039/C1EM90029C

View the profiles for the rest of the Editorial Board here.

Professor Beate Escher is Deputy Director of the National Research Centre for Environmental Toxicology (Entox) in Brisbane, Australia, where she researches mode-of-action based environmental risk assessment, including methods for initial hazard screening and risk assessment of pharmaceuticals and pesticides with an emphasis on mixtures, and especially effect assessment of transformation products and disinfection by-products. One of her goals is to close the gap between exposure and effect assessment through approaches linking bioavailability to internal exposure and effects via understanding and modelling of toxicokinetic and toxicodynamic processes.

Her research expertise covers “Exposure and Impacts” and “Novel Analytical Tools and Measurement Technologies” areas of our scope.  Take a look at some of her recent research in these areas:

Recovery of a freshwater wetland from chemical contamination after an oil spill
Haipu Bi, David Rissik, Miroslava Macova, Laurence Hearn, Jochen F. Mueller and Beate Escher
DOI: 10.1039/C0EM00406E

Advantages of toxicokinetic and toxicodynamic modelling in aquatic ecotoxicology and risk assessment
Roman Ashauer and Beate I. Escher
DOI: 10.1039/C0EM00234H

JEM Spotlight: Monitoring the treatment efficiency of a full scale ozonation on a sewage treatment plant with a mode-of-action based test battery
Beate I. Escher, Nadine Bramaz and Christoph Ort
DOI: 10.1039/B907093A

We asked her what areas of environmental science she thought would gain significance in the next few years:
“Areas of growing significance will be the disinfection by-products and transformation products of organic micropollutants.”

View the profiles for the rest of the Editorial Board here.

Frank Wania is Professor of Environmental Chemistry at the University of Toronto, where his research is focussed on the environmental fate and transport of organic contaminants, with a view to gaining a mechanistic understanding of contaminant enrichment processes through a combination of field work, laboratory experimentation and model simulations. Current projects he is working on deal with the development and application of passive air sampling techniques for semi-volatile organic contaminants, the interaction of contaminant fate and climate, the identification of new environmental contaminants by theoretical means, and the quantification of the role of snow in the environmental fate of pollutants.

Professor Wania’s expertise covers the following categories of the scope of JEM: “Source, Transport and Fate” and “Novel Analytical Tools and Measurement Technologies”, with a growing interest in aspects of “Exposure and Impacts”.

For some examples of his latest research in these areas why not try these hot papers:

Mercury fate in ageing and melting snow: Development and testing of a controlled laboratory system
Erin Mann, Torsten Meyer, Carl P. J. Mitchell and Frank Wania
DOI: 10.1039/C1EM10297D

Visualising the equilibrium distribution and mobility of organic contaminants in soil using the chemical partitioning space
Fiona Wong and Frank Wania
DOI: 10.1039/C1EM10109A

Global climate change and contaminants—an overview of opportunities and priorities for modelling the potential implications for long-term human exposure to organic compounds in the Arctic
James M. Armitage, Cristina L. Quinn and Frank Wania
DOI: 10.1039/C1EM10131E

We asked Professor Wania what he thinks the future holds for environmental chemistry:
“I expect some of the most interesting work to arise from collaborative projects, e.g. when modellers and field researchers join forces to design clever field experiments, or when environmental scientists work across the boundaries that have developed over the years, e.g. between the atmospheric science community and the environmental organic chemists.”

You can also read his Editorial for his ambitions for the journal as “the periodical of choice for cutting-edge research on environmental processes and impacts“ here or view the profiles for the rest of the Editorial Board here.