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Mae Sexauer Gustin
STAR Grantee receives University of Nevada-Reno Biotechnology and Natural Resources Researcher of the Year Award
(July, 2002) STAR grantee, Mae Sexauer Gustin, was recently awarded the College of Agriculture Biotechnology and Natural Resources Researcher of the Year Award by the University of Nevada-Reno. This monetary award is given to one researcher each year who is nominated and chosen by a college committee.
Dr. Gustin started doing mercury research in 1994 at the Desert Research Institute where she participated in an NIEHS-funded project looking at mercury emissions from contaminated mine tailings at the Carson River Superfund Site in Nevada. This work led to her first EPA Science to Achieve Results (STAR) grant that looked at light-enhanced emissions of mercury from soils. The research conducted for this grant started to build the infrastructure of data used to assess natural mercury emissions.
Continued funding from the EPA STAR program during the past several years at the University of Nevada-Reno, in collaboration with Stanford University, has been used to measure mercury emissions from mine wastes and surrounding mercury-enriched soils. One aspect of this work focused on linking mercury emissions to the specific chemical state of mercury. More information on this research can be found at http://es.epa.gov/ncer/final/grants/96/airchem/gustin.html.
Dr. Gustin also participated in another exciting project under EPA Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) funding. In this research, she investigated the connection between plants and mercury cycling in the environment using large, ecosystem-sized "mesocosms" or "ecocells." This work showed forest canopies might be a significant pathway for transferring mercury from the atmosphere to terrestrial ecosystems and helped advance our understanding of the role of vegetation in the biogeochemical cycle of mercury.
Dr. Gustin is an assistant professor in the Environmental and Resource Science Department at the University of Nevada at Reno. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona-Tucson in geochemistry and economic geology, an M.S. from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in igneous and metamorphic petrology, and a B.S. from Guilford College in geosciences. She has published extensively in the peer-reviewed literature on many aspects of mercury in the environment.
Additional information on the STAR program can be found at the National Center for Environmental Research. For more information, contact Estella Waldman at Waldman.Estella@epa.gov.