Shortly after Burlington High School closed last September because of high levels of airborne toxic chemicals in its tech center building, district Superintendent Tom Flanagan got what he thought was encouraging news.

Moala Keshei Bannavti, ISRP trainee, won the University of Iowa Graduate College's 2020 Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition. Bannavti is a PhD candidate in Civil and Environmental Engineering studying room-to-room variation and remediation of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).

Since March, the 970 students at Burlington High School have had only one day of in-person education: Their first day, in September, before the discovery of airborne PCBs — carcinogenic chemicals — shuttered the building for the fall.

The Iowa Superfund Research Program (ISRP), a leader in the study of human exposure to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), has received a highly competitive five-year, $11.4 million grant renewal from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). ISRP will receive $2.4 million for the first year of the renewal.

Four ISRP researchers attended an EPA meeting in East Chicago, Indiana, on April 6, 2019. The EPA debriefed East Chicago residents on its planned cleanup activities for the U.S.S. Lead Superfund site, which encompasses East Chicago’s Calumet neighborhood.

ISRP researchers have developed a method to measure the movement, or flux, of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from water to air using passive sampling devices. The Project 4 team, led by Andres Martinez, PhD, and ISRP director Keri Hornbuckle, PhD, demonstrated that simple and cost-effective passive samplers could be used to overcome this challenge.

ISRP trainee Eric Uwimana and colleagues from the ISRP Synthesis Core, Project 1, and Project 3 investigated the biotransformation of PCB 91 to OH-PCBs by human liver microsomes (HLMs) and published their work in Environmental Science & Technology

In a study released in Environmental Science & Technology, Dr. Keri Hornbuckle and trainees Jacob Jahnke and Nick Herkert discovered that kitchen cabinets built within the last five years emit PCBs into the air.

The ISRP Research Translation Core released the first in a series of web-based applications designed to transfer ISRP research methods and data to researchers, regulators, government, the general public, and other stakeholder communities.

ISRP researchers Keri Hornbuckle and Peter Thorne have been interviewed by numerous newspapers and National Public Radio after the release of their findings of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in schools in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.