A List
8/23/04

SLU PROF AWARDED GRANT FOR LAKE CHAMPLAIN MERCURY STUDY

CANTON -- St. Lawrence University Assistant Professor of Chemistry Ning Gao has 
been awarded a grant of $92,900 by the Lake Champlain Research Consortium to 
fund a study by her and other scientists of mercury contamination in Lake 
Champlain.
	The project, entitled "Enhancements to the Lake Champlain Mercury Mass 
Balance: A Multidisciplinary Approach," will be headed by Gao. Collaborators 
are Celia Chen, biology, Dartmouth College; Philip K. Hopke, chemical engineering, 
Clarkson University; Neil Kamman and Rich Poirot, of the Department of 
Environmental Conservation in Vermont; Andrea Lini, geology, University of 
Vermont; and James Shanley, of the U.S. Geological Survey, Vermont/New Hampshire 
District. The research will take place in 2005.
	The grant award will allow the expansion of a research project under way 
on mercury in Lake Champlain that has been conducted since 2000; the project 
has been led by Gao, in collaboration with a team of researchers in New York and 
Vermont. Three previous one-year grants from the Lake Champlain Research Consortium, 
with funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 
(NOAA)/Cooperative Institute for Limnology and Ecosystems Research (CILER), have 
been awarded to the team. Through the project, the researchers have developed and 
refined a mass balance model to account for the sources, sinks and accumulation of 
mercury in Lake Champlain, and they have been able to identify some possible types 
and locations of emission sources that contribute mercury to the Lake Champlain 
Basin, via atmospheric transport and deposition. The research has led to one 
peer-reviewed publication, two journal submissions and one manuscript in 
preparation.
	This new grant award will allow the team to further improve the mass 
balance model by adding a biocycling component to account for the uptake of 
mercury by zooplanktons and fish in the lake. 
	Gao is a graduate of Zhongshan University in China, with a master's 
degree from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Ph.D. from Clarkson 
University.

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