Environmental Science: Nano Blog

Andrea Hicks is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin – Madison in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. Her work broadly focuses on the environmental impacts of emerging technologies. She completed her undergraduate studies at Michigan Technological University in Environmental Engineering, and her M.S. in Environmental Engineering at Clemson University. Dr. Hicks completed her doctoral and post-doctoral work at the University of Illinois at Chicago in Civil Engineering and at the Institute for Environmental Science and Policy. She is a recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award, UW-Madison Community Based Learning Teaching Award, and the Sustainable Nanotechnology Organization’s Emerging Investigator Award.

Read Andrea Hick’s Emerging Investigator Series article “Emerging investigator series: calculating size- and coating-dependent effect factors for silver nanoparticles to inform characterization factor development for usage in life cycle assessment” and read more about her in the interview below:

Your recent Emerging Investigator Series paper focuses on ‘Calculating size- and coating- dependent effect factors for silver nanoparticles to inform characterization factor development for usage in life cycle assessment’. How has your research evolved from your first article to this most recent article?

My role in the article preparation has changed. I was a PhD student when I wrote my first article, working with my advisor Dr. Tom Theis. Whereas now I am the PhD advisor, writing this work with my student Sila Temizel-Sekeryan. Which is a different experience. In general, I have always been interested in emerging technologies, such as engineered nanomaterials. In my first article, as part of my PhD work, I was studying light emitting diodes, and their potential for energy efficiency rebound. And while the rebound effect, or Jevons’s paradox is still part of some of my work, engineered nanomaterials are another interesting emerging technology which like light emitting diodes, have the potential to influence environmental impact due to their ubiquity.

What aspect of your work are you most excited about at the moment?

This work is particular is really exciting. I have studied the environmental impacts of nano-scale silver in consumer products before, such as textiles, and a question that was always part of that work was how to model the environmental impacts of the nano-scale silver itself as a part of the life cycle assessment. In this work, we took some of the first steps to better understand how to incorporate the impact of the nano-silver itself into the assessment. This work would not have been possible without a great deal of work having already been done by experimentalists in order to understand the toxicity of nano-silver.

In your opinion, what are the most important questions to be asked/answered in this field of research?

Speaking broadly about emerging technologies, which include engineered nanomaterials, what I think is the most important question is whether or not an advance is societally beneficial. Advances in technology have had a great benefit to society in general, but at the same time there is also an environmental cost. I think that it is critical to evaluate the environmental impacts of  new technologies and potential unintended consequences before they are broadly adopted.

What do you find most challenging about your research?

Emerging technologies are often challenging to study, because they are just that, emerging. It is often difficult to obtain enough information to model these products, either using life cycle assessment or other tools. One way to counter this is to work with other researchers who are actually developing these new technologies and products, to secure the necessary information. What is really exciting about working with people who are researching the technologies themselves allows us to use the life cycle assessment data that we generate, to refine the new technology to make it less environmentally costly.

In which upcoming conferences or events may our readers meet you?

2020 is turning out to be an interesting year for conferences and events, with many being cancelled or moved to fully digital formats, particularly in the United States where I live. In general, I like to attend the North American Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry annual meeting, Sustainable Nanotechnology Organization annual meeting, and the International Society for Industrial Ecology meetings. I was fortunate to be able to attend the second Pan-American Nanotechnology Conference in Brazil early this past spring, before everything shutdown. I’m also a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in our Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and in normal times am on campus.

How do you spend your spare time?

That is a particularly interesting question in 2020. Aside from doing work which I love, I am also a mother to two energetic grade school children and have wonderful husband. I like to spend my spare time with them. In spring 2020 when our school district and daycare shutdown, spare time did not really exist anymore, because I was working and teaching remotely, while supervising my children’s online learning.

Which profession would you choose if you were not a scientist?

When I was younger, I thought about a lot of different careers, and my main goal was to do something where I felt I could make a difference in the world. Which I know sounds terribly idealistic. I thought for quite a while about being a journalist and writer, documenting people’s stories and bringing them to a wider audience. Or a photographer, like Dorothea Lange, who used her photos to document the human consequences of the Great Depression. Or maybe a medical doctor, making a difference in the lives of my patients. Or a sculptor, bringing art and beauty to the world. It’s actually a really hard question.. I’m lucky that I have a job I really enjoy, where I get to work on cutting edge science, teach and mentor students, and do service in the community.

Can you share one piece of career-related advice or wisdom with other early career scientists?

When you see the career trajectory of someone you admire, and wonder how you could ever be that good, you need to remember that they got there one step at a time. It all starts with a single step, applying for an opportunity, or writing a manuscript or defending a dissertation. They didn’t become who they are overnight, it took time. You just need to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and if you do that diligently you be amazed at the heights you can reach.

Dr. Kathryn Riley is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Swarthmore College. She received her Ph.D. from Wake Forest University in 2014 and was a National Research Council (NRC) postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) from 2015 to 2016. Before her current appointment, she was a Consortium for Faculty Diversity (CFD) postdoctoral fellow at Swarthmore from 2016-2018. Dr. Riley’s research involves the development of analytical techniques for the characterization of nanomaterials and their dynamic physical and chemical transformations in biological and environmental matrices. Her research group specifically aims to broaden participation in the field by developing techniques that provide new quantitative insights in less time and at a reduced cost when compared to more commonly employed methods. Projects in her group span the analysis of silver nanomaterials, including their dissolution, aggregation, formation of bio-coronas, and release from commercial products. To learn more about Dr. Riley’s research, visit her lab website or follow her on Twitter.

Read Kathryn Riley’s Emerging Investigator Series article “Emerging investigator series: Quantifying silver nanoparticle aggregation kinetics in real-time using particle impact voltammetry coupled with UV-vis spectroscopy” and read more about her in the interview below:

Your recent Emerging Investigator Series paper focuses on Quantifying silver nanoparticle aggregation kinetics in real-time using particle impact voltammetry coupled with UV-vis spectroscopy. How has your research evolved from your first article to this most recent article?

My interest in nanomaterials began while I was in graduate school. At the time, I was developing capillary electrophoresis (CE)-based methods for screening DNA aptamer libraries against clinically relevant protein targets and using next generation sequencing (NGS) for identification of candidate aptamers. To support some research questions of our collaborators, I ended up developing CE separation methods for sub-micron and micron-sized plastic particles. I found the work of developing analytical tools to study particles to be incredibly interesting, so I knew that I wanted to dive deeper into the field of nanotechnology during my postdoc at NIST. There, I continued my work applying the separation principles of CE to gain new insights about nanomaterials. Over the past several years, my work with undergraduate students at Swarthmore has sought to add to our analytical toolkit by developing electrochemical methods to probe the reactivity of metal and metal oxide nanomaterials. Looking ahead, we are excited to start applying these tools to increasingly complex nanomaterial chemistries and contribute new insights to the field.

What aspect of your work are you most excited about at the moment?

Of our current projects, there are two that I’m particularly excited about at the moment. The first builds on the electrochemical techniques we have developed in our lab over the past two years to enable in situ quantification of dissolved and nanoparticulate silver released from textiles. Due to the fast time resolution of the measurement, this technique would allow researchers to quantify release kinetics of the two silver forms simultaneously and without the need for sample preparation. The second project involves evaluation of the silver nanoparticle metabolite corona using a model environmental bacterium. Both of these projects allow us to push our instrumental techniques towards analysis of more complex systems, which is challenging, but exciting.

In your opinion, what are the most important questions to be asked/answered in this field of research?

There are so many! I think one of the biggest challenges is the wide parameter space to be analyzed, including variations in the physicochemical properties of the nanomaterial, changes in its properties as it encounters diverse water, soil, air, and/or biological chemistries, and the varied responses of the environment to the nanomaterial. There are many excellent small-scale benchtop studies and large-scale mesocosm studies, but with so many parameters to explore, what does it all mean and how can we use the rich information gathered from both types of data to predict the behavior of new or unexplored materials?

What do you find most challenging about your research?

Most often the aspects of my work that I find most exciting are also those that are the most challenging. Our lab has spent a lot of time analyzing silver nanomaterials, which can simultaneously dissolve, aggregate, and form bio- and eco-coronas (and form oxides, sulfides, and insoluble chlorides). This complexity presents a significant analytical challenge for our lab and others – how do you ever isolate and study just one of these processes?! Fortunately, as an analytical chemist, these are precisely the challenges that I am most eager to help the community overcome.

In which upcoming conferences or events may our readers meet you?

Whether virtually or in-person, I plan to attend the Sustainable Nanotechnology Organization (SNO) conference in October 2020 and the Environmental Nanotechnology Gordon Research Conference (GRC) in June of 2021.

How do you spend your spare time?

As an alumna of Swarthmore and a former student-athlete, I enjoy spending my free time supporting our athletics teams. I volunteer my weekends to help coach our varsity softball team. In the summer, you can find me tending to my vegetable garden or playing in slow pitch softball leagues.

Which profession would you choose if you were not a scientist?

I think I would be an architect or interior designer – I used to spend hours as a child designing homes on graph paper and even when I had the chance to reconfigure my laboratory space at Swarthmore, I pulled out my iPad and drafted a to-scale design of every inch of that space. The builders must have thought I was crazy (if not for that then for overseeing the “building site” on an almost daily basis), but they literally made my lab design come to life!

Can you share one piece of career-related advice or wisdom with other early career scientists?

I have had the great fortune of having fantastic mentors throughout my trajectory – some who are in my field, some who are not – some who look like me, some who do not. The single most important characteristic that they’ve all had in common is their ability to be solution oriented as I’ve faced challenges in my career, even as those solutions sometimes pushed me outside of my comfort zone. The deep, mutual respect we built in our mentoring relationship allowed for them to give and for me to receive this advice, and I have become a better leader and mentor to my students because of it. Find mentors like those!