Achievement

EIGER trainee Kelly Haus has made a breakthrough over the last year by performing research with her advisor, mineralogist Michael Hochella, as well as with an analytic chemist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and an environmental scientist at the University of Vienna in Austria. She spent six months in Sweden and Austria. This interdisciplinary combination discovered that nanoparticles of titanium dioxides and iron oxides are responsible for transporting lead and arsenic nearly 200 miles downstream from their source in the largest metal contaminated site in the United States. She was able to make these discoveries by a highly sophisticated array of techniques and laboratory procedures, including asymmetrical flow field fractionation, multi angle laser light scattering, high resolution inductively coupled mass spectroscopy, and high resolution scanning/transmission electron microscopy.