Event title: IERQC Webinar: Practical Aspects of Sampling and Analysis of PFAS in Environmental Matrices Relevant to Projects in the Great Lakes Region

Location: Online via Zoom

Description: 

Speaker: Chip McCarty, General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT)

About the Presentation

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are widely used and long-lasting chemicals that break down very slowly over time and have been linked to harmful health effects in humans and animals. As a class, PFAS includes several thousand chemicals that may be found in many different consumer, commercial, and industrial products. PFAS is one of the latest in a long line of “new and emerging” environmental contaminants that have captured attention world-wide in the last 15 years. Initially, the EPA’s method development and regulatory actions for PFAS were focused on drinking water as a major source of human exposure. However, other EPA Offices and other federal and state agencies also developed analytical methods to address sources of PFAS exposure to humans and the environment from other environmental matrices, including wastewater, soils, sediments, biosolids, fish tissue, solid wastes, and landfill leachates. The goals of this presentation are to: 1) provide information on the most recent method development efforts by the EPA and others, 2) examine the practical aspects of PFAS sampling and analysis that differ from other environmental contaminants, and 3) offer guidance for successfully planning and executing PFAS-related projects in the Great Lakes Region.     

About the Presenter

Chip McCarty, a Senior Scientist at GDIT, earned a B.S. in Environmental Science from Rutgers and a Ph.D. in Chemical Oceanography from the University of Rhode Island and is currently responsible for a wide variety of method development projects, fish tissue monitoring programs, effluent guideline studies, and data validation efforts. He has over 10 years of field and laboratory research experience including investigations of the fate and transport of pollutants in the marine environment, disease and calcification processes in stony corals, stable isotope analysis, and petroleum diagenesis. He has supported various EPA Offices and programs since 1986, including Superfund’s Contract Laboratory Program, the Office of Water’s Effluent Guidelines Program, the Great Lakes National Program Office (GLNPO), and others. He has designed and managed many method development projects and method validation studies, and is a principal author of EPA Method 1633 for PFAS and EPA Method 1621 for Adsorbable Organic Fluorine (AOF).

Organizers: Interagency Ecological Restoration Quality Committee (IERQC)

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CERPs/CERPITs: This conference has been approved for 1 CEC(s).