Robuck wins NIEHS KC Donnelly Externship for research on PFAS
Anna Robuck is doctoral student working with Rainer Lohmann, Ph.D., at the University of Rhode Island SRP Center. For her externship, Robuck will travel to Research Triangle Park, North Carolina to work with Mark Strynar, Ph.D., and James McCord, Ph.D., at the U.S. EPA's Office of Research and Development.
Robuck focuses on the distribution of PFAS in marine food webs and water. The externship will expand Robuck's research by allowing her to use non-targeted and total fluorine methods to measure new and poorly characterized PFAS chemicals in the Delaware River Estuary. These methods provide a more complete characterization of PFAS compared to targeted methods, which only measure a small subset of the thousands of known PFAS chemicals. Robuck will assess the presence of PFAS chemicals in passive samplers, water samples, and fish samples collected from the estuary. She will use these data to estimate the total PFAS in the system.
"The externship will provide me valuable training and mentorship in non-targeted analysis of environmental samples," said Robuck. "It will also allow me to collaborate with groups outside of my immediate academic institution and in a federal agency setting."
