Chemistry Matters' Blog

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...

I am deep into preparing materials to teach for a 2 day seminar on polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) that is coming up in November. I am gathering the information for the seminar, scouring the latest literature to find good support material. It is a very big task to get done to have something of real value for the...

It was not that long ago that a smoky haze was across southern Alberta from fires in Washington State.  The haze was caused by wildfires and the winds moved the smoke over Alberta.  Wildfires seem to be very common lately with the latest one making the news from California. Wildfires can be caused naturally or caused by...

Oil sands development in Alberta has been getting a lot of bad press lately. From Dr. Schindler’s work calling for more science to the federal government of Canada taking over monitoring programs and developing scientific advisory panels.

I was at a conference in Corvallis, OR on the topic of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons called ISPAC 2013 (www.ispac2013.com) a couple of weeks ago. I was invited to give one of the plenary talks on PAHs on the subject matter of PAH use in environmental forensics investigations. I have recently posted a guest blog at ...