Dr. Kathy Vandiver (Center for Environmental Health Sciences), Professor Harry Hemond (Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering), and their team had their work on testing water quality for the Passamaquoddy Tribe featured by the NIEHS! This was a participatory project that looked at drinking water quality in rural Maine,…

Coming from a collaboration among multiple MIT SRP Labs (White, Essigmann/Croy, Samson and Engelward), results show that the levels of a single enzyme can dictate the disease outcome for NDMA.  Congratulations to MIT SRP authors Jenny Kay, Joshua Corrigan, Amanda Armijo, Ilana Nazari, and Ishwar Kohale on their publication…

Congratulations to SRP trainee, Jessica Beard, and faculty member, Timothy Swager, for their publication in the Journal of Organic Chemistry! This is a pivotal paper for the MIT Superfund Research Program, both because it is tour de force in terms of the chemistry that is described, and also because…

One of MIT’s former SRP trainees, Jennifer Kay, was named the 23rd winner of the Karen Wetterhahn Award. This SRP-established annual award recognizes an outstanding graduate student or post-doctoral researcher that best demonstrates the qualities of scientific excellence exhibited by Dr. Wetterhahn. Kay says: “I aspire to her enduring…

The Olin Chemical Superfund Site in Wilmington, MA, contains high levels of NDMA, a probable human carcinogen that traveled nearly a mile underground, contaminating town wells that had been used by thousands of people. After the discovery of a childhood cancer cluster, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health did…

Program Director Prof. Bevin Engelward and RTC leader Dr. Jenny Kay collaborated with editors of the science outreach journal Scientia to produce an article about the MIT SRP and its biological research projects. The article describes the NIEHS Superfund Research Program and MIT SRP’s chemicals of interest, N-nitrosamines, probable human carcinogens t…

Cell survival assays are routine in many life science laboratories, yet direct measurements of cell growth are rarely performed due to the fact that the gold standard colony forming assay is slow and laborious. A novel adaptation to the traditional colony forming assay was developed by Postdoc Lizzie Ngo of the…

A team led by CEC Director Dr. Kathy Vandiver won the Norman B. Leventhal City Prize, a $100,000 award offered by MIT’s Leventhal Center. The objective of the ‘Malden River Works for Waterfront Equity and Resilience’ project is to create a public open space to improve opportunities for community recreation and…

A group of Superfund Research Program Center leaders from MIT, Northeastern University, University of Kentucky, and Louisiana State University went to Washington DC to engage with Professional Staff from the House and Senate Appropriations Committees. Led by Prof Akram Alshawabkeh of Northeastern, the objective of the meetings was to share…

A blind spot for high throughput genotoxicity assays is the inability to detect bulky lesions on DNA that have the potential to be carcinogenic. To overcome this limitation, Drs. Lizzie Ngo and Norah Owiti from the Engelward laboratory developed new methodologies for the CometChip, a high throughput comet assay…