PROTECT PI and co-Director Akram Alshawabkeh will present at the Columbia SRP on March 19th. This follows a presentation earlier this year at Northeastern by Columbia SRP Director Joseph Graziano as part of the PROTECT webinar series (click here to view Dr. Graziano’s presentation).
Click here for more information about Dr. Alshawabkeh’s presentation at Columbia. The presentation abstract is below.
“Puerto Rico Testsite for Exploring Contamination Threats (PROTECT)”
– NIEHS Superfund Research Program Center –
https://web.northeastern.edu/protect/
Akram N. Alshawabkeh, PhD, PE, Fellow ASCE
George A. Snell Professor of Engineering
Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Northeastern University
Boston, MA
An overview of the PROTECT Superfund Research Program (SRP) Center will be presented and discussed. The Center evaluates exposure to environmental contamination in Puerto Rico and its potential contribution to preterm birth (less than 37 completed weeks of gestation). The PROTECT SRP Center also seeks to better understand the phenomena affecting fate and transport of hazardous substances (specifically chlorinated solvents and phthalates) in karstic aquifers and to develop green remediation strategies that attenuate and mitigate exposure to protect human health and ecosystems. Puerto Rico has been selected as a testsite for the program because it has the highest rate of preterm birth (~20%) among the states and territories of the U.S., and because of the extent of hazardous waste contamination on the island. Puerto Rico has more than 150 contaminated sites that include 15 active Superfund sites. Although Puerto Rico is an island with an unusually high burden of pollution, including a considerable density of Superfund sites, this project is the first to investigate the causal relationships between environmental pollutants and preterm birth in this at-risk population. The PROTECT research program is based on integrated analytical, mechanistic, epidemiology, fate-transport, and remediation studies, along with a centralized, indexed data repository,
Team: PROTECT is a multi-project, multi-institution collaboration that includes Northeastern University, University of Puerto Rico-Medical Sciences Campus, University of Puerto Rico- Mayaguez and the University of Michigan. Center research involves significant interaction and sharing of samples, testing and results among the disciplines of engineering, analytical chemistry, epidemiology, and toxicology.
Speaker: Akram Alshawabkeh, PI and Co-Director of PROTECT, is the George A. Snell Professor of Engineering at Northeastern University. His research interests include soil physicochemical processes, soil remediation, electrokinetic/electrolytic processes and modeling contaminant fate and transport in soil. Professor Alshawabkeh is a Fellow of the ASCE, an NSF CAREER Award recipient and a Fulbright Scholar. He received his PhD in 1994 from LSU, and his BS in 1988 and MS in 1990 from Yarmouk University in Jordan.
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