Chemistry professor receives federal grant to study “forever chemicals”

Paul Edmiston, the Theron L. Peterson and Dorothy R. Peterson Professor of chemistry at The College of Wooster, received a $140,884 federal grant from the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program, a partnership between the Department of Defense and the Environmental Protection Agency, to study how per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAs, can be mitigated at federal facilities.

PFAs are known as “forever chemicals” which means that they don’t break down in the environment. They are present in many consumer products, drinking water, and air, and can lead to a wide range of health problems. Edmiston’s project addresses environmental needs of the DOD by developing technologies to ensure that fire-fighting foams used at military bases are free of these chemicals, as well as to measure and remediate water that is contaminated with PFAs.

Edmiston explained that the EPA and DOD currently does not have a method to measure PFAs in fire-fighting foams. “We’re hoping that we can, first of all, develop the methods to accurately measure PFAs in formulations and in water and develop some technologies that will further help by removing the PFAs compounds if they are present in water or formulations,” he said.

This research is significant because of how pervasive and persistent PFAs have become. “PFAs compounds are not biodegradable. As a result, if there is a product that has them in it, then they’re going to persist for a very long time,” Edmiston said. “They are coming to be found nearly everywhere.”

The grant will fund the research for two years and allow Edmiston to hire Wooster students to participate in the experiments to study water samples and develop new fire-fighting foams for the DOD. Edmiston finds it important to include undergraduate students in his work. “I have two parts of my mission as a scientist at Wooster,” he said. “Number one, to do cutting edge research and number two, to involve students in that so that they learn to become scientists themselves and in the future work as I am to solve these problems that we have in the world.”

The grant is part of $690,000 in total funding from SERDP that Edmiston has received in the past four years to find ways to detect and mitigate PFAs at federal facilities. The team will be using mass spectrometry instruments that the Wooster chemistry department acquired through grants from the National Science Foundation.

Image: Edmiston and Yubin Kim ’24, a chemistry major, use Wooster’s advancement mass spectrometer to study the chemicals in their samples.

Posted in Faculty, News on February 8, 2023.