I absolutely love doing research,” avows Eva Webster, Ph.D. student in the Environmental and Life Sciences Graduate Program at Trent. “To come in in the morning with the thought of ‘what am I going to discover today?’ is a thrill beyond all thrills.” Recently, Miss Webster’s passion has been rewarded with a $5000 scholarship from the Air & Waste Management Association Ontario Section (AWMA-OS) for future environmental professionals.

Miss Webster, who earned her M.Sc. from Trent in 1995, has worked for 15 years with Drs. Don Mackay and David Ellis at Trent’s Centre for Environmental Modelling and Chemistry. She left her position there in 2010 to pursue her Ph.D. under the supervision of Professor Ellis. For her thesis, Miss Webster will be developing new environmental fate models for organic chemicals with a focus on those chemicals that have traditionally been considered ‘model-hostile’ such as perfluorinated surfactants and siloxanes.

“With complex systems such as the environment, modelling is a valuable tool for understanding and predicting chemical behaviour,” says Miss Webster. Until now, however, certain classes of chemicals have defied modelling, leading to the label “model-hostile.”  “Existing models were designed for chemicals like PCBs,” explains Miss Webster, “but those models don’t work for chemicals that are not sufficiently like PCBs. The scientific understanding for these other chemicals is not where it needs to be. We don't fully understand how they're moving in the environment.”

For Miss Webster, there is urgency to her work. “These chemicals are in every aspect of your life that you can imagine,” she asserts – from prescription drugs to cleaning fluids. “When these chemicals are released into the environment through a sewage treatment plant, for example, and into the river, they don’t necessarily stay in the water. They can move into the sediment and be taken up by fish, or can actually move into the air. Once in the air, they can then be deposited on the land. So the chemicals move in the environment and these are models that seek to predict and improve our understanding of how those chemicals move. Modelling can help to avoid environmental disasters and focus experimental effort and thus reducing unnecessary costs. Modelling can also reveal aspects of a system that need additional experimental investigation.”

Miss Webster is the second Trent student in the past two years to receive the prestigious AWMA-OS scholarship. Last year, Trent Environmental Chemistry graduate Kelly LeBlanc received one of the three grants awarded annually for her research in environmental selenium contamination. The scholarship is intended to foster the furtherance of studies relating to the environment and sustainability, by striving to encourage young leaders to enter the environmental field and to stimulate professionalism. “To me, this scholarship is a very valuable endorsement of the quality of my research, and my research potential,” says Miss Webster.

When she graduates, Miss Webster hopes to continue her work as a research scientist. “I want to contribute to the global knowledge base necessary for us to be good stewards of the environment, the earth and its resources,” says Miss Webster. “Only by understanding how organic chemicals move within the environment and are potentially changed by it can we make informed decisions about what chemicals we use and how we use them.”