Emily Seelen, a graduate student with Robert Mason who has a NSF Graduate Fellowship, was recently awarded a GROW (Graduate Research Opportunities Worldwide) fellowship to spend nine months working with Dr. Erik Björn at the University of Umeå in Sweden. Emily left in October to begin her study: “A molecular approach to understanding the bioavailability of methylmercury associated with various sources of natural dissolved organic matter (DOM)”. The focus is on coastal and oceanic DOM interaction with methylmercury, which has been studied very little relative to its interaction with other DOM pools. Emily’s research will involve the use of high resolution instrumentation to characterize the DOM and it’s methylmercury binding capacity including x-ray near edge adsorption structure spectroscopy, Orbitrap LC-MS, and other related approaches. Emily has been a NSF Graduate Fellow since July 2013.
Image: Emily extracting organic matter from water samples for her studies in Sweden.
