Assistant Professor of Biology Mike McCormick co-organized and presided over a symposium at the American Chemical Society meeting in Chicago during March. The symposium titled "Abiotic and Biotic Factors Affecting Contaminant Fate at Iron Oxide Surfaces," was organized in collaboration with Dr. Ed O'Loughlin of Argonne National Lab and Assistant Professor Dan Giammar at Washington University in St. Louis.
The symposium drew more than 100 contributing authors from eight countries to present their research on the interactions of microbes with iron oxide minerals, and on how these interactions can be used to clean up some of the most problematic contaminants in groundwater. The remarkable discovery that many microbes have the ability to respire iron oxides (breath rust!) has lead to intense interest in understanding the metabolism of such organisms and on how these organisms and the biogenic minerals they produce can be used to degrade or immobilize contaminants such as uranium and chlorinated solvents.
