Dr. Robin Bond (formerly Schneider) currently teaches environmental and analytical chemistry at The Evergreen State College.  Dr. Bond is in the process of setting up her lab at TESC where she will continue her work in environmental redox chemistry. Please check back for open research opportunities in a few months!

The projects described below were initiated during Dr. Bond (Schneider)’s years at St. John’s University in Jamaica, NY. Students’ whose names are in bold presented posters on their research.

Europa Project

Jupiter’s moon, Europa,  is a prime candidate for finding extraterrestrial life because of two factors. Firstly, it has a lot of water (potentially more than is found in Earth’s oceans). But life in its ocean could not be too much like that in terrestrial oceans, because the ocean is covered by 60 km of ice! Unlike marine microbes on Earth, the microbes at the base of a hypothetical Europan marine food chain could not rely on photosynthesis as an energy source. Instead, the source of their energy might be oxidation-reduction reactions spawned by the second factor that makes Europa of interest to astrobiologists: an abundant source of hydrogen peroxide.

The goal of this project is to examine hydrogen peroxide kinetics in a modeled Europan ocean and determine how they affect the redox cycling necessary to sustain life. Eventually we will have model oceans with extremophiles from Earth, but that is several years in the future.

Past research students: J. Mirkovic, L. Palisoc.

Gowanus Canal Project

It’s easy to predict how two chemicals will interact in a controlled laboratory setting. Environmental chemistry is a lot of fun precisely because there are hundreds of substances involved and it’s not always clear what is going to react with what.

This project examined redox cycling and metal mobility in a waterway contaminated with both toxic metals as well as recalcitrant organics—and, more importantly, what might happen when if the equilibrium were upset by trying to remediate the system. Our field site, the Gowanus Canal, is shown in the header picture above.

(Now that Dr. Bond is working on the opposite side of the country, she is looking for field sites that are more local. However, she hopes to be able to continue her work with the Gowanus Canal as it is considered the most polluted waterway in the USA.)

Past research students: S. Johnson, A. Peck,  L. Diawara, N. Cacarmo-Ortiz