David Krabbenhoft

(Chair) U.S. Geological Survey

David Krabbenhoft is a Senior Research Scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), located in Middleton, Wisconsin. Dave began working on environmental mercury sources and cycling in 1988, and the topic has since consumed his professional life. In 1993, Dave established the USGS’s Mercury Research Laboratory, which includes a team of multi-disciplinary mercury scientists and a state-of-the-art analytical facility strictly dedicated to low-level speciation analysis of mercury. Currently, Dave’s research team is active on projects that span environments as far ranging as the world’s to freshwater systems from Alaska to Florida, California to New England, and more recently across the Great Lakes. While environmental mercury research has been his focus since 1988, the specifics of his research team are wide ranging, including: atmospheric mercury sources and transport at local-to-global scales; cycling and fluxes of mercury in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems; biogeochemical controls on the bioavailability of mercury to methylation; and most presently the development of a global ocean model for understanding the distribution of methylmercury across the world’s ocean basins. Dave continually serves on a number of interagency committees and panels, including presently as a technical expert to the United Nations Environmental Program’s Minamata Convention. In 2006, he served as the co-host for the International Conference on Mercury as a Global Pollutant, which was attended by over 1,200 researchers representing 54 countries across the globe. Since 1990, he has authored or coauthored over 140 papers on mercury in the environment. In 2015, Dave was promoted by USGS, Department of the Interior to Senior Research Scientist, the highest level attainable by a scientist in the federal government system.

Carl Lamborg

University of California, Santa Cruz

Dr. Carl Lamborg is an Assistant Professor of Ocean Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Prior to this, he was an Associate Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. His research interests are focused on the marine biogeochemistry of mercury, most recently in the open ocean, but also include historical reconstructions of environmental mercury fluxes at a variety of temporal scales. He received a BA from Oberlin College in Chemistry, an MS in Environmental Chemistry from the University of Michigan with Prof. Jerry Keeler, and a Ph.D. in Oceanography at the University of Connecticut with Prof. Bill Fitzgerald.

Alex MacKerell

University of Maryland

Alex MacKerell received a Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 1985 from Rutgers University, which was followed by postdoctoral fellowships in the Department of Medical Biophysics, Karolinska Intitutet, Stockholm, Sweden and the Department of Chemistry, Harvard University. In 1992 he assumed his faculty position in the School of Pharmacy, University of Maryland where he is currently the Grollman-Glick Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences and the Director of University of Maryland Computer-Aided Drug Design Center. MacKerell is also Co-founder and CSO of SilcsBio LLC, a biotech company in the area of computer-aided drug design. http://mackerell.umaryland.edu/MacKerell_Lab.html

Elizabeth Phillips

Department of Energy Oak Ridge Office

Elizabeth Phillips is a Program Manager at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management (OREM). She has over 30 years of experience in environmental remediation, and is currently managing the Technology Development Program at OREM. In addition, for the past 10 years, she has participated in the planning and execution of mercury remediation activities at the Y-12 National Security Complex. Ms. Phillips participated in the development of both the Oak Ridge Mercury Remediation Strategy and the Groundwater Strategy for the Oak Ridge Reservation.She is an original member of the Mercury Science Focus Area Advisory Committee, which began in 2009. Prior to coming to Oak Ridge, she managed the Groundwater and Seismic Programs for the Department of Energy at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. She also worked for Martin Marietta Energy Systems and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Ms. Phillips is a subject matter expert on the use of frozen soil barriers to contain radioactively contaminated water, and has two publications on Research Gate.She holds a Bachelor of Science in Geology from Vanderbilt University and a Masters in Environmental Engineering.

Richard Sparling

University of Manitoba

Dr. Richard Sparling is a professor in the Department of Microbiology at the University of Manitoba. He specializes in the study of microbial physiology of anaerobic Bacteria and Archaea using both biochemical and functional genomic techniques. Systems studies have included microbial uptake of mercury, methanogenesis as well as cellulose fermentation pathways in clostridia for biofuels production. He was co-lead of the multi-group Genome Canada funded Microbial Genomics for Biofuels and Co-products from Biorefining Processes research project (2010-2014). He was the 2015 recipient of the University of Manitoba Excellence in Graduate Student Mentoring award in Science and Engineering.

Tamar Barkay

Rutgers University

Dr. Tamar Barkay is a faculty in the Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology at Rutgers University where she studies how microorganisms interact with toxic heavy metals focusing on the role of microbial transformations in the mercury geochemical cycle. Dr. Barkay has served on the editorial board of Applied and Environmental Microbiology and FEMS Microbiology Ecology, and is an Associate Editor for Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene. She is also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the American Academy of Microbiology.

Joel Blum

University of Michigan

Dr. Joel D. Blum is the Gerald J Keeler Distinguished University Professor and the John D. MacArthur Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Michigan. His research group focuses on studies of geochemical controls on the structure and function of ecosystems, and on the application of trace element and isotope geochemistry across the Earth and Environmental Sciences. They utilize state-of-the art methods of chemical analysis and stable and radiogenic isotope measurement to address a wide variety of research problems, from forest biogeochemistry and hydrogeochemistry to studies of fisheries and marine chemistry. Dr. Blum is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene, a new open-access journal publishing original research reporting on new knowledge of the Earth's physical, chemical and biological systems; interactions between human and natural systems; and steps that can be taken to mitigate and adapt to global change. He previously served as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Chemical Geology and on the editorial board of Geology. Dr. Blum has received numerous awards including: the C.C. Patterson Award of the Geochemical Society (2013); Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (2012); Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2010); Fellow of the Geochemistry Society (2010); and Fellow of the Geological Society of America (2005).

Robert Mason

University of Connecticut

Dr. Robert Mason, a professor in the Departments of Marine Sciences and Chemistry at the University of Connecticut works on all aspects of mercury biogeochemical cycling and bioaccumulation in aquatic systems. His works covers diverse environmental systems from coastal and open ocean environments to freshwater ecosystems. His works focuses on exchange across interfaces (air-water, sediment-water) and on the biogeochemical factors that influence uptake at the base of aquatic food chains, and the rates of biotic and abiotic methylation and demethylation of mercury in sediments and the water column. He has published over 150 peer-reviewed papers, with the majority focused on the environmental fate and transport of mercury compounds. He is on the editorial board of several journals and has acted as an editor for several journal special issues, and books. He published in 2013 a book titled Trace Metals in Aquatic Systems.

R. Wildung

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Steve Lindberg

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (retired)

Steve Lindberg is an Emeritus Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He worked at Oak Ridge from 1974 until he retired in 2005, directing a research group on Atmosphere/Earth Interactions. He was Adjunct Professor at the Universities of Michigan, Tennessee, and Nevada, and Visiting Professor at institutes in New York, Sweden, and Germany. He received the Humboldt Foundation Award in 1987, was elected Fellow of the AAAS in 1992, and won the Haagen-Smit Prize in 2011. In 2013 he was honored in Edinburgh, Scotland with the Mahaffey Lifetime Achievement Award in Mercury Research.He served on numerous editorial and science review boards in the US and Europe, and chaired the International Mercury Conferences in Hamburg and Minamata. He edited nine books and whole journals, and authored over 230 open literature publications on biogeochemical cycling, with several in Science and Nature. He has published 140 research papers on mercury, focusing on air/surface exchange, speciation, and industrial emissions.