Helbling Research Group

Congratulations Yitong on a fantastic MS thesis and defense!

In this collaborative effort, we used fish bioaccumulation data to train, test, and validate three supervised machine learning algorithms to predict sources of PFAS exposure.

Our results demonstrate that PFAS fingerprints in fish tissue may be an effective means of PFAS source tracking in surface water systems. Check out the paper in Environmental Science & Technology Letters!

Congratulations Dr. Paige Jacob!!!

Congratulations to M and Stephanie for winning prizes for their oral presentations at the 2023 CEE GSA Research Symposium!

Happy to share the product of our recent collaboration with colleagues at Stanford (Will Tarpeh), Michigan (Krista Wigginton and Nancy Love), and Buffalo (Diana Aga)!

In this study, we coupled treatment technologies for nutrient removal/recovery from urine with non-target analysis to assess the fate of pharmaceuticals during these processes. Our approach can inform and advance the implementation of urine resource recovery. Check out the paper in ACS ES&T Engineering!

We are excited to share the third first-author paper from Casey’s PhD, “Evaluating the Performance of Novel Cyclodextrin Polymer Granules to Remove Perfluoroalkyl Acids (PFAAs) from Water.”

In this work, we evaluated the performance of cyclodextrin polymers (CDPs) following processing to generate CDP granules of varying particle size. This work is an important step forward in understanding the performance of novel CDPs in a morphology that is compatible with many types of widely implemented adsorption processes. Congratulations, Casey!

Another great collaboration with the Dichtel lab at Northwestern!

In Paige’s latest paper published in ACS ES&T Water, she developed a novel analytical method to rapidly and simultaneously measure short- and ultrashort-chain PFASs in water and wastewater samples. Application of this method contributes environmental occurrence data for ultrashort-chain PFASs. Check it out here. Congrats Paige!

Summer 2022 is winding down, but the HRG had a great time meeting with old friends and colleagues at conferences all summer long!

• Damian, Paige, and Stephanie were thrilled to see Michael Zumstein again at the GRC: Water!
• Damian and Ri had the opportunity to catch up at the AEESP conference in St. Louis!
• Damian and Nayantara learned a TON at the PFAS workshop in Long Beach!
• And Paige knocked it out of the park with another oral presentation at ACS Chicago!

…TECHCON 2022 in Austin, TX and the RemTEC Summit on Emerging Contaminants in Westminster CO are on deck for the Fall! Hope to see some of you there!

Congratulations to Casey (PhD) and Danyeh (BS) for their graduation this Spring! We are so happy for you and excited to see what your futures bring!!

Interested in suspect or nontarget screening of PFAS in water? How confident are you in your PFAS annotations?

We asked those questions amongst a global network of collaborators, and developed a new way to communicate confidence in your PFAS annotations. Read all about it in our new Global Perspective published in ES&T Letters!