Meet the JEM Editorial Board

The JEM Editorial Board has undergone several changes recently (including a new Editorial Board Chair), and this first issue offers an excellent opportunity for us to introduce you to the current board and their backgrounds. Therefore, the following pages include profiles of all our current Editorial Board members and their areas of research expertise. These areas clearly do not cover the entire range of JEM content and we wish to reinforce the message that JEM covers environmental science in its entirety, and we encourage submissions across the broad scope of the journal (see http://www.rsc.org/publishing/journals/em/about.asp for full scope).

Frank Wania, Chair

Scope areas: “Source, Transport and Fate” and “Novel Analytical Tools and Measurement Technologies” with growing interest in aspects of “Exposure and Impacts”

Frank Wania studied Environmental Science at the University Bayreuth in Germany and received his Doctorate in Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry from the University of Toronto in 1995. After two years as a scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Air Research, and three years as a freelance researcher, he joined the University of Toronto Scarborough in 1999, where he is Professor of Environmental Chemistry. He has wide-ranging research interests related to the environmental fate and transport of organic contaminants, with a particular focus on gaining a mechanistic understanding of contaminant enrichment processes through a combination of field work, laboratory experimentation and model simulations. Current projects deal with the development and application of passive air sampling techniques for semi-volatile organic contaminants, the interaction of contaminant fate and climate, the identification of new environmental contaminants by theoretical means, and the quantification of the role of snow in the environmental fate of pollutants.

Looking to the future

I expect some of the most interesting work to arise from collaborative projects, e.g. when modellers and field researchers join forces to design clever field experiments, or when environmental scientists work across the boundaries that have developed over the years, e.g. between the atmospheric science community and the environmental organic chemists.

Jon Ayres

Scope area: “Exposure and Impacts”

Jon Ayres is Professor of Environmental & Respiratory Medicine at the University of Birmingham. He is a respiratory physician, obtaining his MD at the University of London on alcohol and asthma in 1984. His main clinical interests are in occupational and environmental lung disease and he has been an advisor to Government on air pollution for over 20 years, including chairing the Department of Health's Committee on Medical Effects of Air Pollution (COMEAP) and DEFRA's Advisory Committee on Pesticides (ACP). He also advises a range of learned societies on environment and health issues. His main research interests are in the health effects of indoor and outdoor air pollution and the health risks of nanomaterial exposure through epidemiology and through human challenge studies.

Looking to the future

The only way we can understand the true risks from exposure to environmental hazards is to construct robust exposure–response functions for a range of exposure–outcome pairings. This is somewhat easier for outcomes which follow closely on exposures but much harder for those where the relevant exposures precede outcomes by long periods of time. We therefore have to define better ways of determining those exposures in objective rather than subjective ways – a huge challenge!

Beate Escher

Scope areas: “Exposure and Impacts” and “Novel Analytical Tools and Measurement Technologies”

Professor Beate Escher is Deputy Director of the National Research Centre for Environmental Toxicology (Entox) in Brisbane, Australia, which is a joint venture between the University of Queensland and Queensland Health. Professor Escher received her PhD in Environmental Chemistry from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, ETHZ, Switzerland. Professor Escher's research interests focus on mode-of-action based environmental risk assessment, including methods for initial hazard screening and risk assessment of pharmaceuticals and pesticides with an emphasis on mixtures, and especially effect assessment of transformation products and disinfection by-products. One of Escher's goals is to close the gap between exposure and effect assessment through approaches linking bioavailability to internal exposure and effects via understanding and modelling of toxicokinetic and toxicodynamic processes. More practically oriented aspects of her work include passive sampling and effect-based methods for water quality assessment. Further she has an interest in improving dosing methods for very hydrophobic and volatile compounds and developing new in vitro assays for bioaccumulation and toxicity assessment.

Looking to the future

Areas of growing significance will be the disinfection by-products and transformation products of organic micropollutants.

Liang-Hong Guo

Scope area: “Novel Analytical Tools and Measurement Technologies”

Professor Liang-Hong Guo is a principal investigator and group leader at the Center for Eco-environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He obtained his D. Phil. degree from Oxford University, UK, after thesis work on protein electrochemistry and biosensors. He then did post-doctoral research work on surface chemistry and interfacial electron transfer at the University of Rochester, USA. His current research interests include biosensors and bioassays for quantitative determination of environmental chemicals and chemical toxicity testing, interactions of environmental chemicals with biological molecules and their toxicological implications, and nanomaterials for water purification.

Looking to the future

Newly developed research tools in the life science fields will gain popularity in the study of environmental toxicology. Nanotechnology-based devices for large-scale water purification will also be demonstrated.

Kristopher McNeill

Scope area: “Source, Transport and Fate”

Professor Kristopher McNeill is a professor at ETH Zurich and chairs the Environmental Chemistry group. He received his PhD in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1997, co-advised by Professors Robert Bergman and Richard Andersen. Following postdoctoral research with Professor Philip Gschwend at MIT (Civil and Environmental Engineering) from 1997 to 1999, he began his independent career as a faculty member at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Chemistry and joined the faculty of ETH Zurich in 2009. His research is focused on environmental organic chemistry, with a particular focus on developing a molecular-level understanding of environmentally important processes. His group has ongoing research projects focusing on the fate of emerging contaminants, natural organic matter photochemistry, the environmental chemistry of proteins, and metal-mediated defluorination reactions.

Looking to the future

The challenge that environmental organic chemists face going into the future is that problems are moving out of our comfort zone of small, charge-neutral, hydrophobic molecules to large, polyfunctional, and/or less well-defined species. The rule book of how one approaches the environmental chemistry of things like biomacromolecules or carbon nanomaterials still needs to be written.

Wunmi Sadik

Scope area: “Emerging Contaminants and Nanotechnology”

Wunmi Sadik is Professor of Chemistry & Director, Center for Advanced Sensors & Environmental Systems at State University of New York at Binghamton (SUNY-Binghamton). She received her PhD in Chemistry from the University of Wollongong in Australia and did her postdoctoral research at the US Environmental Protection Agency (US-EPA). Dr Sadik has held appointments at Harvard University, Cornell University and Naval Research Laboratories. Research areas include interfacial molecular recognition processes, sensors, and new measurement approaches and their application to solving problems in biological systems, energy and the environment. Sadik chaired the first Gordon Research Conference on Environmental Nanotechnology in 2011.

Looking to the future

The last decade has witnessed an explosion of interest in the science and technology of engineered nanomaterials. Research and development in the next decade will focus on the overall sustainability of nanotechnology including the need to develop standardized nanomaterials, characterization parameters, metrological tools and protocols for a better understanding of the interactions of nanomaterials with biological and environmental systems.

Shinsuke Tanabe

Scope area: “Source, Transport and Fate” and “Exposure and Impacts”

Dr Shinsuke Tanabe is a Professor at the Center for Marine Environmental Studies (CMES), Ehime University, Japan. He is the Program Leader of the Global Center of Excellence (G-COE) Program sponsored by Japanese Ministry of Education and JSPS and has worked in collaboration with many national and international organizations, including as a consultant. He is one of the scientists who carried out pioneering work on the importance of developing countries in the global scenario of pollution by persistent organic pollutants. He has established the Environmental Specimen Bank at Ehime University, catering to the needs of many research institutions. His laboratory is currently involved in global monitoring of trace and radioactive elements, classic and novel persistent organic pollutants (POPs), and also pharmaceutical and personal care products (PPCPs), especially in developing countries in Asia and Africa. They are also involved in measuring the in situ, in vivo and in ovo toxic implications of persistent chemicals like dioxins and related chemicals (DRCs) on wildlife and humans.

Looking to the future

Emerging POPs are exclusively man-made but extremely toxic to humans, present in all our organs and tissues. The effect of POPs on humans is well known but their toxic implications will become a hot cake for scientists to deal with in the future. Also, radioactivity is actively making human life bright at present but may make it gloomy in future if emissions from atomic power plants are not controlled. There will be a need for continuous assessment of pollution from the thousands of such plants in the future.

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