The national SRP group gathered in Sacramento recently for the annual program meeting. A session on PFAS Detection, Treatment and Impacts featured new research from Joseph Braun, Brown School of Public Health, and Jennifer Guelfo, Brown School of Engineering.
Jennifer GuelfoJennifer reported on her 2017 KC Donnelly Award, which provided support for her to collaborate with the EPA Atlantic Ecology Division in Narragansett Rhode Island to study the occurrence and behavior of PFAS in the urbanized watershed that feeds the Narragansett Bay. Jennifer is moving on from Brown to take a faculty position at Texas Tech - congratulations, Jennifer!
Joseph Braun, a recent addition to the Brown SRP program, reported on his new study entitled: Identifying Metabolic Pathways Associated with Childhood Exposure to Perfluorooctanoic Acid. In the same session, Dr. Jitka Becanova from the University of Rhode Island (URI) spoke about her 2018 KC Donnelly Award, which involvesJoseph Braun development and testing of passive samplers for PFAS through a URI-Brown collaboration led by Dr. Rainer Lohmann. The session was chaired by Wendy Heiger-Bernays of the Boston University SRP and offered a multifaceted look at the PFAS contamination problem with input from experts on environmental measurement, source identification, remediation, and human health effects.