College of Ocean and Fishery Science
College of Engineering
School of Medicine
School of Forest Resources

College of Ocean and Fishery Sciences

School of Oceanography

• Jody W. Deming: Dr. Deming is the Director of the Marine Bioremediation Program and co-founder (with Dr. Paul Bentzen) of the new Marine Molecular Biotechnology Laboratory (MMBL) in the College of Ocean and Fishery Sciences. She and her students are interested in fundamental aspects of the behavior of natural microbial populations in the marine environment, including the production of extracellular degradative enzymes and the role of motility in bacterial access to organic patches within sediments. She also studies microbial activities in extreme environments such as deep-sea and polar sediments, submarine hydrothermal vents, and the subsurface biosphere beneath seafloor spreading zones. Her molecular interests include the detection of microorganisms in extreme environments according to genetic sequences and the biotechnological potential of psychrophilic and barophilic bacteria. She is an active sea-going scientist, serving as Chief Scientist of Arctic ice-breaking expeditions, and as a participant in US and French submersible explorations of the seafloor. She is the recipient of a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation and the Arctic Service Medal from the US Coast Guard.
• Dr. Richard G. Keil: Dr. Keil's work is centered around the preservation and degradation of organic compounds in aquatic environments, global carbon cycles, microbial processes that lead to organic matter burial or preservation, sorptive processes between organics and mineral surfaces, and application of flow-based separation techniques to process and study individual components of complex mixtures.
• Dr. Evelyn Lessard: Dr. Lessard has a long-standing interest in the associations between protozoa and their prey. She is a recogized authority on the ecology of heterotrophic dinoflagellates which can be major grazers in some marine systems. She is particularly interested in the role that protozoans as grazers of bacteria play in the breakdown on natural and anthropogenic particles and aggregates in the marine environment. One link that she is exploring is the exchange of metabolites in both directions between protozoan predators and bacterial prey. She has other general and specific interests in microzooplankton ecology, oceanic and coastal microbial food web dynamics, estimating protist growth rates with rRNA, and exploring carotenoid pigments as biomass analogs for heterotrophic protists.

School of Fisheries
• Dr. Russell P. Herwig: Dr. Herwig is a molecular microbial ecologist with a long-term interest in marine microbiology and the biodegradation of natural and anthropogenic recalcitrant compounds in the environment. For the past five years he has provided a critical interface between investigators from Civil Engineering, Fisheries, and Forestry in the development of biological treatment systems for contaminated groundwater and landfill leachates. During the past two years he developed modern molecular phylogenetic protocols for the analysis of the bacterial communities in contaminated and clean marine sediments. This effort is now supported by an exploratory research grant from the EPA. In the summer and fall of 1997, Dr. Herwig worked with the Seattle District of the Army Corps of Engineers on a project to determine the mineralization of representative PAHs on the contaminated beach in Eagle Harbor. Dr. Herwig teaches a lecture and laboratory undergraduate course called "Aquatic Environmental and Seafood Microbiology", and co-teaches with Dr. Stuart Strand a graduate course called "Microbial Degradation of Toxic Contaminants."


College of Engineering Sciences

Department of Civil Engineering

• Dr. John Ferguson: Dr. Ferguson has extensive engineering experience with the treatment of recalcitrant, particulate wastes in aquatic media. He considers the roles of microorganisms explicitly. His work with anaerobic-aerobic treatments began in the mid 1980's (Woods 1985) on degradation of chlorinated phenolics in freshwater systems, including efforts to isolate anaerobic cocultures capable of degrading selected compounds (Hakulinen et al. 1984). At present he is studying sequential, reactor-based anaerobic and aerobic treatment of bleaching waters from pulp and paper manufacture and has developed new projects specifically related to the bioremediation of marine sediments contaminated with chlorinated and polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAH). The main emphasis of this work is measuring the extent of contaminant removal and trying to understand the mechanisms and biodegradation by anaerobic and aerobic enriched microbial communities in both freshwater and marine systems. He also continues studies of advanced biological treatment systems, mainly for chlorinated aliphatics, for groundwater remediation. This project, supported by the NIEHS Superfund Basic Research Initiative, focuses on reactor modeling, involving biodegradation and growth kinetics as well as mass transport. He has received the prestigious Harrison Prescott Eddy Award for Outstanding Research three times (1974, 1978, 1984).
• Dr. H. David Stensel: Dr. Stensel's research is in the area of biological processes, including reactor designs and application of specialized bacteria for degradation of toxic priority pollutants. He has worked extensively with cometabolic degradation of chlorinated organic compounds, methods to enhance biodegradation and various reactor designs, including fixed film processes. Prior to his academic career he worked for a decade in industry dealing with environmental process technology development and applications. His interests in marine bioremediation concern methods to enhance PAH degradation and physical and microbial controls on desorption of toxicants in marine sediments. He has received (1987) the prestigious Harrison Prescott Eddy Award for outstanding research.

Department of Chemical Engineering
• Dr. Barbara Krieger-Brockett: Dr. Krieger-Brockett focuses on reactor theory and the behavior of complex reacting systems, with an emphasis on identification of kinetic mechanisms and rate parameters, rate-limiting steps, and slow transport of reactants and products to and from the reaction zone. These reacting systems are invariably related to problems of the environment; in the past, problems in atmospheric chemistry, and in the present, the study of polluted marine sediments. In her research she uses mathematical simulation to describe the reaction rates of the microbes in a benthic consortium, the concentration profiles of their nutrients and metabolic products, as well as the biodegradation and dilution of the toxic hydrophobic chemicals or xenobiotics in marine sediments. She and her students then attempt to determine which processes are central to enhancing the overall toxic degradation rates, much like process optimization in the chemical industry. For example, in marine sediments the dissolution rate of the hydrophobic compounds or desorption from the sediment grains appears to be a very slow process, and may limit the bioavailability of toxics to microbes that can metabolise them. For experimental determination of some of the needed parameters, she uses statistically designed experiments to maximize the reliability of the parameters.


School of Medicine

Department of Genetics

• Dr. Clement E. Furlong: Dr. Furlong has experience in characterizing the mechanisms and regulation of microbial nutrient transport systems. He has isolated a number of stable strains with elevated levels of transport and metabolism of specific nutrients. He has purified and characterized a number of receptor proteins involved in transport and chemotaxis. During the past ten years, he has been working on problems related to bioremediation. He cloned and sequenced the E. coli xylose isomerase gene which was then expressed in yeast. He has developed protein-based bioadsorber systems for removal of pollutants from aqueous environments. Three patents have been issued for cadmium adsorbers. He is collaborating with electrical engineers and bioengineers on the development of protein-based biosensors to use in automating the bioadsorbers and for mapping spill sites, which has led to issuance of a fundamental patent on a digital biosensor. He has developed bioreactors for the automated production of proteins for use in bioadsorbers, biosensors, and as biodegradative enzymes. Recently, he has cloned and sequenced the cDNAs that encode human and rabbit paraoxonase, an organophosphate hydrolase that also hydrolyzes several nerve agents and organophosphate insecticides. He has more than ten years experience in gene sequencing, analysis, and cloning, site-specific mutagenesis and genetic engineering.


Department of Microbiology

• Dr. James T. Staley: Dr. Staley is a general microbiologist with extensive experience in the ecology and systematics of soil and aquatic bacteria. He has long-term interests in several ecological topics including the role of microorganisms in the formation of desert varnish and the biology of sea-ice bacteria. He is also interested in the taxonomy and physiology of aquatic heterotrophs including in particular the gas vacuolate bacteria, sea-ice bacteria, prosthecate bacteria and bacteria involved in bioremediation. Since 1976 he has served as Trustee and Editorial Board Member of the Bergey Manual of Systematic Bacteriology, the definitive guide to the systematics of bacteria. He takes primary responsibility for teaching environmental microbiology in the School of Medicine. Recent activities related to the URI include the identification of bacteria associated with degradation of chlorinated aromatic and aliphatic compounds and bacteria capable of chitin degradation. Prof. Staley is the author of numerous scientific papers and books including portions of Bergey's Manual of Systematic Bacteriology .
• Dr. John A. Leigh: Dr. Leigh, an expert on methanogens, is developing the first genetic model for a marine methanogen using Methanococcus marpaludis as the organism of choice. The genetic methodologies of cloning, transposon insertion, mutagenesis, transformation, homologous recombination, selection by constructed antibiotic resistance, and lambda library construction are being pursued to achieve this goal. Because M.marpaludis produces carbon monoxide dehydrogenase (CODH) and dehalogenates organic toxicants, a better understanding of the genetic regulation of these processes is of key interest to goals in marine bioremediation.


College of Forest Resources

• Dr. Stuart E. Strand: Dr. Strand focuses upon the roles of oxidants in degradation of refractory anthropogenic materials. He has extensive experience in the study of cometabolism, particularly regarding the abilities of methane-oxidizers to degrade toxic compounds. His recent work has included a systematic exploration of the cometabolic capabilities of oxygenase-expressing bacteria in the marine environment. This work has extended the range of compounds that methane oxidizers are known to degrade to include the polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). He is also interested in anaerobic degredation of chlorinated compounds and of the PAHs. His present work is focused on the enrichment of bacterial PAH degradation using iron, nitrate, and manganese as oxidants. Dr. Strand's lab has also developed genetic probes for the detection of nitrifying bacteria in marine environments and is working on procedures for the extraction and quantification of DNA from sediments.




---

UW Marine Bioremediation Program
Last Modified: December 29 1999 by seashell@u.washington.edu
© Copyright 1995-1999 UW MBP