Recently received notice that I will be receiving the PA Space Grant Fellowship for the 2016-2017 academic year. I received this fellowship because my work falls under NASA directorates and I’m involved with science outreach on and off campus. Below is my personal write up explaining why my research fits the NASA mission directorates.

The NASA Mission Directorates that my research could support are (1) Human Exploration and Operations in the Human Research Program under the element of Space Human Factors and Habitability (SHF&H) and/or (2) Science Technology, specifically the Game Changing Development (GCD).

The Living Filter is a unique system for the eastern United States where wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) effluent, which has undergone primary and secondary treatment as well as chlorination, is spray irrigated over agricultural and forested lands as a final tertiary treatment and to recharge the groundwater system. This site has been in full-scale operation for over 20 years. As a long-term wastewater reuse system, examining the effectiveness of the Living Filter in removing wastewater contaminants offers insight into the possibility of continuously reusing wastewater within the same system. This research on wastewater reuse applies to not only Earth systems as water resources become limited, but also the reuse of water on space missions, space stations, or other closed systems where wastewater reuse would be a necessity. Specifically, the reuse of wastewater would lead to reduced mass, volume, and waste of overall water systems during exploration missions (SHF&H).

While WWTP processes and many man-made filtering processes do an adequate job of removing typical wastewater contaminants, many of these processes do not remove emerging contaminants like pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) and, even, antibiotic resistance genes. The research for this project will focus on antibiotics, one type of PPCP. Antibiotics are heavily utilized for common infections and not completely removed during WWTP processes similar to other PPCPs. While the presence of antibacterial compounds and PPCPs at low levels within the environment currently have unknown effects, the consensus among the scientific community is that continuous exposure to low levels of these compounds is not ideal for human, animal, and ecological health, and additional research is necessary to determine the long-term effects. Even on space missions and space stations, where people selected to participate would be reasonably healthy, health circumstances may arise where drugs would need to be taken, and personal care products would probably continue to be used routinely. Therefore, PPCPs would most likely be present in these closed systems, and determining the risks that these compounds pose at low levels is critical not only for human, animal, and ecological health on Earth, but also the human and ecosystem health in closed systems such as space crafts or space stations (SHF&H).

In addition to the possible health risks of PPCPs at the low levels typically found in the environment, if wastewater is reused in a closed system and the contaminant removal process is ineffective, the potential for the concentrations of these compounds to increase over time rises with each cycle of reuse and could result in additional negative biological impacts. Soil may offer a means (process) of removing pharmaceuticals, including antibiotics, from wastewater that is destined for reuse (GCD). In a closed system, the ability to remove not only typical contaminants, but also emerging contaminants, would allow greater sustainability and lower the potential health risks and complications. And if soil was being used for this reuse and the system was large enough, the soil could be used for raising select crops in addition to remediation (reuse) purposes and provide additional sustainability (GCD).

Even though this project is focusing on antibiotics, the knowledge gained from studying antibiotics could be applied to other pharmaceutical compounds and personal care products that have similar chemical characteristics and physical properties through the use of modeling either fate and transport or ecological and health risks. By determining the ability or inability of soil at The Living Filter to remediate antibiotic compounds, future steps could be taken to either use that technology for filtering wastewater effluent or determining better ways of filtering effluent. Furthermore, by determining the ecological and/or health impacts (risks) of these compounds present at very low concentrations, decisions can begin to be made about the acceptability of these very low quantities of PPCPs in water and whether additional remediation steps are actually necessary for water quality and sustainability. Finally, once this project is complete, my long-range goal is to look at other emerging compounds that may be in effluent to determine their fate and transport as well as potential ecological and health impacts when at low concentrations.