NEWS

Anke was invited to this year’s Telluride worksop on ‘Biogeochemistry and Redox Transformations of Iron’ (organized by Alexis Templeton, University of Colorado
Boulder, CO; and Andreas Kappler, Eberhard-Karls-University Tübingen, Germany). Set in beautiful Telluride, CO, this workshop brought together 22 researchers (group picture below) who investigate processes that control Fe biogeochemistry from the atomic scale to the systems scale. Within this small and handpicked group, many interesting and lively discussions took place, both during the schedules sessions and during hikes, after-session beer, and dinners/barbecue.

As usual, the meeting was intense and extremely inspiring, leading to new ideas that are now in the process of being formed into experiments and future work (i.e. grant applications).

Kath has been awarded a $3,000 research grant from the Clay Minerals Society. The grant will allow her to expand her PhD work on the reactivity of clay minerals and to investigate the interactions between microbial exudates (e.g. electron shuttling compounds) and clay minerals.

Congratulations Kath!

 

Kath and Jim attended the Research in Progress meeting of the Environmental Mineralogy Group (Mineralogical Society) in Bristol. Jim presented a poster of his work on ‘Biologically Mediated Abiotic Degradation of Chlorinated Ethenes’ and Kath presented a talk on her work on ‘Organic contaminant transformation at the clay mineral-water interface’. Both presentations were well received and Kath was awarded the prize of £50 for the best student oral presentation. Congratulations Kath – well deserved!

Thanks to the Mineralogical Society for the travel bursaries Kath and Jim both received!

Anke was invited to present a talk at the 251st American Chemical Society National Meeting & Exposition in San Diego, CA (13-17 March 2016). She delivered a presentation on ‘Organic contaminant reduction at the clay mineral-water interface‘ in the Session Environmental Interfaces within the Division of Geochemistry – the data was mostly from Kath’s work. Thank you Kath for this excellent work so far and please keep the results coming!

Anke also presented a poster on the first results from Khalid’s project and received interesting feedback during the session.

Wojciech joined the group as a postdoc in November 2015 on a part-time basis. He will work on the CEG Seed Corn Funding project ‘Smart reactive sorbents for the removal of emerging contaminants‘, which was designed by both Wojciech and Anke and includes collaboration with Maggie White from the School of Chemical Engineering and Advanced Materials.

Welcome Wojciech!

James (Jim) Entwistle joined the group as PhD student in September 2015. He will be working on the SERDP-funded project (in collaboration with the University of Iowa and Geosyntec Consulting) on ‘Biologically mediated abiotic degradation of chlorinated solvents by Fe-rich clay minerals’.

Welcome Jim!

Anke presented recent work, partly including Kath’s first results, in her invited presentation ‘Electron transfer at Fe clay mineral surfaces: reversibility and consequences for contaminant reduction‘ during the session Redox and Radical Biogeochemistry at the Goldschmidt Conference 2015 in Prague.

Khalid Zakaria joined the research group beginning of August 2015 for a two-year postdoc. He will be working on the EPSRC funded Bright Ideas project ‘Cleaning water with mud: clay minerals producing reactive oxidizing species’.

Welcome Khalid!