|
A List
5/22/06
SLU PROF AWARDED GRANT FOR LAKE CHAMPLAIN STUDY
CANTON - St. Lawrence University Associate Professor of Chemistry Ning Gao has been awarded
a grant of $32,059, as part of a $105,000 project grant, by the Cooperative Institute of
Limnology and Ecosystems Research at the University of Michigan, funded by the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This project is an on-going study by her and other
scientists of mercury contamination in Lake Champlain.
The project, entitled "Coordinated Monitoring and Modeling for Mercury in Lake Champlain,"
will be headed by Gao. Collaborators are Celia Chen, biology, Dartmouth College;
Tom Holsen, civil and environmental engineering, Clarkson University; Neil Kamman
and Rich Poirot, of the Department of Environmental Conservation in Vermont;
Andrea Lini, geology, University of Vermont; Eric Miller, Ecosystems Research
Group, Ltd., Norwich, Vermont; and James Shanley, of the U.S. Geological Survey,
Vermont/New Hampshire District. The research will take place in 2006.
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. In recent years,
a total of five 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 several published articles on the
topic.
The team's efforts to date have identified several key gaps in the available
information about the atmospheric transport and deposition of mercury, and its
fate within the lake-watershed ecosystem. This new grant award will allow the team
to address and fill in those gaps with new research.
Gao is a graduate of Zhongshan University in China, with two master's degrees from
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Ph.D. from Clarkson University.
-30-
More information: Science at St. Lawrence
|
