EMSI: Chemical and Biological Interactions at Environmental Interfaces

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

This Institute will create fundamental molecular-level understanding of environmental interfaces and the important chemical and biological processes that occur at these interfaces. The Institute's efforts will focus on understanding the structure of water at the surfaces of common metal oxides, the interaction of water with these solids, the effect of hydration on the structure of solid surfaces, the nature of the electrical double layer at solid-water interfaces, the sorption of heavy metal and metalloid ions onto solid surfaces, and how microbial biofilms influence all of these features or processes. Accurate models of the processes occurring at these interfaces are key to understanding solute-substrate interactions. The multidisciplinary team will use a combination of state-of-the-art in situ synchrotron radiation-based spectroscopy and scattering, computational chemistry, and molecular genomic methods to examine the interaction of water and selected metal and metalloid contaminant ions with environmentally important solid substrates with and without microbial biofilm coatings in simplified model systems. In addition, parallel molecular-level studies of more complex natural systems containing contaminant species, such as arsenic and lead, as well as bacteria will be carried out, building on these fundamental studies. Physicochemical and microbiological processes taking place at environmental interfaces influence many natural processes, such as the weathering of earth materials and the formation of solils, as well as the transport and fate of environmental contaminants. A team of scientists and engineers has been assembled to develop and apply new experimental and computational techniques to studies of environmental interfaces. The Institute includes chemists, geochemists, microbiologists, physicists, and soil chemists to ensure that the basic research will also inform more applied research. Some of the important applications of this research include studies that will lead to predictions of the transport behavior and potential bioavailability of heavy metal contaminants in natural aquatic systems and environmental remediation of toxic metals. A cohort of talented and diverse graduate and undergraduate students and post-docs will be trained to work on these complex problems in an interdisciplinary setting. The researchers will also help train middle and high school science teachers in summer institutes on environmental science and will interact with science writers to disseminate their discoveries to the larger public. Environmental Molecular Science Institute (EMSI) awards are given to interdisciplinary teams of university, industrial, and/or national laboratory scientists working on problems aimed at increasing fundamental understanding of natural processes and processes resulting from human activities in the environment at the molecular level. The emphasis in these awards is on collaborative research among teams with complementary research interests and the creation of broad educational experiences for students. The Stanford EMSI team is a partnership among eight faculty at Stanford University, Princeton University, and the University of Alaska-Fairbanks (funded by the National Science Foundation Divisions of Chemistry and Earth Sciences), three researchers drawn from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (funded by the Department of Energy Division of Environmental Remediation Sciences), and one researcher from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Additional collaborators include a researcher from the U.S. Geological Survey, researchers from several French universities, and four industrial partners (Corning, Inc., DuPont, Skeletal Kinetics, and Zyomyx). The NSF EMSI award incorporates a Collaborative Research in Environmental Molecular Science award, CHE-0089215.