Chemistry Matters' Blog

Having recently joined the team at Chemistry Matters Inc., I am excited to have transitioned from academic science to an industry position that has allowed me to apply, on a daily basis, laboratory techniques that I learned and practised during my undergraduate and graduate studies.

Well, that's a wrap. The 11th multidimensional chromatography workshop held at Chaminade University in Honolulu, Hawaii is over. Another year, another MDCW in the books. The conference was niche and almost all the talks focused on two dimensional gas chromatography.

Gas chromatography (GC) is an analytical technique that characterizes a chemical mixture by separation and identification of the chemical components. At Chemistry Matters, data generated from GC is used in arson investigations, biomonitoring, and environmental forensic investigations. Developing a concise timeline...

Next week, I will be traveling to Philadelphia for the PITTCON Conference. I will be meeting another Chemistry Matters colleague, Michelle Misselwitz there as well. It is not so far to travel for Michelle as she is a resident of Pennsylvania but I will be spending some ever important focus time on a couple of plane...

Environmental forensics investigations sometimes require the determination of which contaminants came from where and how much is from each of the sources present on the site. This is called source apportionment and is a rapidly growing field in environmental litigation and environmental forensics. It is a field...

One of the more common chemical groups that we work on is polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). I have worked on them since 2002 when I developed methods to measure human exposure to PAHs at the Centers for Disease Control and have been working on them ever since. Since 2004, the projects involved PAHs and PAH...

This is the third in a series of blogs on river PAHs (Blog 1 and Blog 2 on River PAHs are here). The aim of our investigations is to answer the question “where did the PAHs come from that were present in all of the Alberta and Saskatchewan rivers?”

In the first post of this series on River PAHs characterization, we described the background to why we have spent many hours driving across Alberta from border to border to collect sediment samples from the rivers of southern Alberta.

For the last few years we have spent a lot of our free time collecting sediment samples from rivers across southern Alberta and characterizing these for Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs). Often driving many hours across prairie gravel roads for a single good sample, it quickly became a passion of quality...

In the first post of this series, I described the basis for how we became involved in determining a method for the detection of a natural, biogenic source of toluene. In this post, I describe how the process works and provide some thoughts on how to conduct an investigation.