This is a past event.

Environmental Engineering Graduate Seminar

Greg LeFevre, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering | University of Iowa

Abstract: Plants are all around us and have been a strong synergy between ecology and environmental engineering for decades. Plants can interact with pollutants both by helping to clean up environmental contaminants or may serve as an exposure route to humans for contaminants that are present in the food supply. In this seminar, I will present our research that probes mechanistic understanding of plant uptake and transformation processes for emerging organic contaminants in green stormwater infrastructure as a remediation approach and recycled water for crop irrigation as a potential human exposure route. Our group employs lab and field-based studies to understand what types of emerging contaminants are likely to be taken up by plants, passive vs. active uptake mechanisms, the first discovery of plant excretion, product to parent reversion of conjugated phytometabolites in the rhizosphere, and in vitro digestion simulations to assess contaminant bioaccessibility within plant tissues. We use high-resolution mass spectrometry for metabolomics and products/pathways discovery to determine what contaminants transform within plants and following digestion, and how plants respond to contaminant exposure. We also employ computational chemistry modeling approaches to enhance apriori predictive power. Understanding how plants take up and transform contaminants will enable better contaminated site clean up as well as ensuring clean food and water supplies.

Bio: Greg is a proud Michigan Tech Husky Alum (class of 2007) and loves connecting engineering principles to nature-based solutions to improve environmental quality. He is an associate professor of environmental engineering and science in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering and IIHR—Hydroscience & Engineering at the University of Iowa where he started in 2016. He did his BS at Michigan Tech, MS and PhD at the University of Minnesota, and Postdoc at Stanford University all in environmental engineering. The LeFevreLab focuses on elucidating biotransformation products and pathways of emerging organic contaminants with the goal of informing improved design of ‘engineered-natural’ treatment systems for non-point pollutants, like urban stormwater and agricultural drainage, and transform wastes into resources. Greg has received multiple sources of recognition for his work, including the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the University of Iowa Early Career Scholar of the Year award, the American Chemical Society Editor’s Choice award and ACS Best Paper award, ES&T James Morgan award (honorary mention), the Royal Society of Chemistry Environmental Sciences ‘Best Paper’, National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering fellow, the AEESP Best Dissertation (both as a PhD student and faculty advisor), amongst others.