Ongoing Research

 

Emily Caffrey is currently completing two reviews for the Electric Power Research Institute. One is a literature survey and proposal for tritium removal technologies for groundwater remediation. The other is a survey of carbon-14 in the environment near nuclear power plants, coupled with updated dose assessment guidelines for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to review.

 

 

Delvan Neville is currently working on radionuclide transport in marine food webs. His other interests include mycoremediation using radiotrophic fungi and improving dosimetry for biota.

 

 

Jon Napier is collecting data on carbon-14 that includes groundwater C-14 activity and dissolved inorganic carbon, soil-gas activity and carbon dioxide concentration, and vegetative C-14 activity. This data will be used to first create a statistical regression model with follow up analyses to be continued.

 

 

Mary Leonard is currently researching bipolymers for remediation of contaminated sediments. She is evaluating chitosan bipolymers for clean-up of radioactive cesium, strontium, and pertechnetate. Chitosan has already been shown to be effective at sequestering various heavy metals in contaminated sediments.

 

 

Ruirui Liu is currently using the Monte Carlo methods to simulate biological damage from ionizing radiation at the cellular and sub-cellular scale. This research promises to yield useful information on low dose effects and next generation computerized phantoms for radiation protection.

 

 

Michelle Comolli is currently investigating the standard of discarding the gastrointestinal tract (GIT) for homogenized whole body dose rate calculations in fish. This is accomplished by utilizing a voxelized model to estimate dose rate contributions from a heterogeneous distribution of radionuclides within the GIT to individual organs.

 

 

Jesse Whitlow is currently working with a local company, Earthfort, to test a biological remediation strategy to be applied to environmental contamination cleanup.

 

 

Mario Fernandez is creating voxel models of a honeybee and an earthworm for improved dosimetry purposes.