Sewage Pollution
As increases in population, industrialisation and urbanisation pose an ever increasing risk to the environment it is becoming increasingly necessary to develop better methods for the detection of pollution to help aid in environmental protection. Since the 1960s there has been increasing interest in the development and use of biomarker compounds to monitor levels of urban and agricultural waste introduced to the marine and terrestrial environments; the relative stability of the compounds enabling both spatial and long-term temporal studies to be realised.
My research interests in this area are focused on the analysis of steroidal biomarkers in soils and associated groundwaters. The specificity of particular biomarkers for different faecal sources makes their use particularly attractive especially in circumstances where deducing the origin of sewage constituting a pollution event is crucial. Estrogens represent another group of steroidal biomarkers that have been implicated in the feminisation of organisms in the natural environment and as such represent constitute another aspect of pollution research that interests me.
