December 5, 2016
Elizabeth Martin, doctoral student in environmental sciences and engineering at UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and trainee in the UNC Superfund Research Program (SRP), has been named recipient of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences’ Karen Wetterhahn Memorial Award.
In Wake County, some predominantly African-American neighborhoods in urban areas completely lack access to nearby municipal water systems. As a result, residents are exposed to notably higher quantities of microbial contaminants via well water.
Rebecca Fry, PhD, presented the first Tarheel Tox Talk, a new public outreach program from the UNC Curriculum in Toxicology. The informal, community presentation at a Chapel Hill restaurant Oct. 4 focused on metal contamination, especially that caused by inorganic arsenic, in drinking water. Dr. Fry, who directs the UNC Superfund Research Program (SRP) Center,... Read more »
Class of: 2017/2018 Degree: PhD, NC State University, Dept. of Biological Sciences Hometown: Lagos, Nigeria I am from Lagos, Nigeria but I’ve lived in North Carolina for a little over 7 years now. My initial interest in science sparked from my older sister, who is a computer scientist, and my parents’ wishes for me to become... Read more »
Jessica Laine was recently awarded a KC Donnelly Externship from the NIEHS Supefund Research Program. Laine is a doctoral student in epidemiology at the University of North Carolina under the direction of Rebecca Fry, Ph.D., and David Richardson, Ph.D. For her externship, Laine will work with Mary Gamble, Ph.D., at the Columbia University SRP Center.... Read more »
Cancer is a major human health risk associated with exposure to many toxic chemicals, including those commonly encountered at Superfund sites such as polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs. UNC SRP investigator James Swenberg, PhD, his Project 1 research team, along with the SRP Chemistry and Analytical Core, collaborated with the National Toxicology Program (NTP) to investigate the formation of DNA adducts... Read more »
Dr. Rebecca Fry of the Gillings School was named co-principal investigator on the UNC ECHO grant, for which UNC was awarded $5 million by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to investigate how exposure to environmental factors in early development can influence the health of children and adolescents.
The UNC SRP Research Translation Core (RTC), along with the University of Arizona (UA) RTC, recently released several innovative education materials on the bioavailability of arsenic and lead, two of the most common contaminants of concern found at Superfund National Priorities List sites. Both metals can vary in their bioavailability, or the amount of the... Read more »
The UNC SRP’s Research Translation Core, Projects 2 and 4, and several community partners, recently launched the Well Empowered initiative to aid communities around the state of North Carolina who may be impacted by toxic metals in private wells in documenting exposure to these toxicants and developing responses to reduce harmful exposures. Following the Dan River coal ash... Read more »
High school freshmen assess uptake of toxic metals by plants in collaboration with the Biomarker Mass Spectrometry Lab Emily Liu and Sara Zangi, freshman at East Chapel Hill High School, developed an award-winning, hypothesis-driven research project exploring phytoremediation as a method to remove heavy metals from contaminated water, specifically examining the biosorption and rhizofiltration properties of four... Read more »
