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Contact: 151 Hilgard Hall
Email: mkausch-at-berkeley.edu
Matteo studies the effects of chemical gradients arising from diffusion limited transport within soil aggregates on biogeochemical processes driving the fate and mobility of environmentally relevant elements. He uses a combination of modeling and experimental techniques including multi-dimensional reactive transport models and flow-through experiments with aggregate systems of various complexities. He has worked on modeling the spatially resolved biotransformation of Fe(hydr)oxides within artificial soil aggregates and is focusing on microbial Se-reduction for his thesis work.
Personal Webpage
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Contact: 151 Hilgard Hall
Email: cmr5064-at-berkeley.ed
Chandra studies the potential rates of nitrate-, iron- and sulfate-reduction in littoral sediments and wetland soils.
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Contact: 151 Hilgard Hall
Email: villaromero-at-berkeley.edu
Juan Fernando investigates the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (B-EF), and the response of these parameters to environmental change. More specifically, he focuses on littoral sediments of the Salton Sea (CA), where he studies microbially-driven rates of selenium oxidation/reduction, microbial diversity, and the response of selenium processing rates and biodiversity to expected increases in water salinity. Selenium has been described as an "essential toxin": the difference between required and toxic concentrations is about an order of magnitude only. Selenium is also an environmental pollutant associated with the irrigation of seleniferous soils, coal mining, and fly ashes discarded from coal-fired power plants. Juan Fernando uses traditional methods to characterize the physico-chemical properties of sediments, as well as slurry incubations, flow-through reactors, DNA microarrays and DNA sequencing. He joined the lab in 2009 and was awarded an EPA-STAR Fellowship to continue his work in the Salton Sea in 2011.
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