Environmental Engineer Beth Ahner of Cornell University will present a seminar co-sponsored by "Cafe Sustainability" and the biology department on Thursday, April 19, 4-5 pm in CNS 112.
After receiving her doctorate at MIT in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Dr. Ahner spent two years as a research associate in the Department of Geology at Princeton University. Her research is in environmental biotechnology. She explores how organisms adapt to trace metal stress in the environment and how they in turn influence the form of metals in the environment – for example how plants solubilize, take up, detoxify, and sequester metals. Her laboratory group focuses on research questions involving intracellular detoxification mechanisms and how biological processes affect the biogeochemical cycling of metals in the natural environment and in engineered systems. One application of this research is to phytoremediation, the use of plants to remove metals from contaminated soils.
