Events Calendar

Astani CEE Department Seminar

Speaker: Elia Psillakis , Technical University of Crete

Talk Title: Emerging and Persistent Organic Pollutants in Aquatic Environment: Mega-sized concerns from a nano-sized world

Abstract: Water quality protection remains a major environmental and policy challenge faced by many industrial as well as developing nations. In particular, the occurrence and fate of trace amounts of a wide range of anthropogenic organic contaminants in water continues to escalate concerns over their potential for ecological and human health effects. Besides the well-known “persistent” organic pollutants, such as PCBs, a range of “emerging” organic contaminants and their transformation products attract considerable attention. These pollutants result from changes in manufactured chemicals, advances in analytical techniques or perhaps because of more detailed monitoring.

I will summarize several of our investigations over the past few years, which aim at the detection, and the identification of the fate of both emerging and persistent organic pollutants in water. I will first discuss on the fundamental concepts of the analytical tools used, so as to explain the scientific basis behind this type of water-quality investigations. Through case studies, I will discuss the overarching issues and challenges we face because of the concurrent presence of different classes of contaminants, such as personal care products, perfluorinated compounds, flame retardants and nanoparticles in aquatic environments. Last, I will try to imagineer the future of this rapidly evolving interdisciplinary research field.


Biography: Dr. Elia Psillakis is an Associate Professor at the School of Environmental Engineering, Technical University of Crete, Greece. She received her degree in Chemistry from the Universitè Montpellier II Sciences et Techniques du Languedoc in France in 1994 and her PhD from the University of Bristol, U.K., in 1997. In 2007, she was awarded a Fulbright research scholarship and spent it at Caltech. Her work focuses on monitoring and studying emerging and persistent hydrophobic organic contaminants in natural and engineered aquatic environments. To date her investigations have resulted into one patent and 68 publications in ISI Journals with more than 3200 citations, an ISI h-index=32, and three “Top cited article awards.”

Host: Astani CEE Department

Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Cassie Cremeans