US-UK COLLABORATION INITIATIVE AND WORKSHOP FOR PFAS RESEARCH Monday, June 3rd to Friday, June 7th, 2024
A notice from Arvin Farid, Ph.D., P.E.
Professor and Director of SEnS-GPS
Event Overview:
The event will serve as a platform to share knowledge and expertise, discuss current research, and develop a joint research agenda to pursue potential funding to collaboratively address the global challenges posed by PFAS. The objectives of the event are to build teams and initiate and foster a long-term collaboration that will enhance our research capabilities at Boise State and understanding of the fate and transport of and ways to detect and mitigate the contaminating impact of PFAS.
Background:
For a long time, PFAS has had the Maximum Contamination Level (MCL) set as 70-110 ppt (i.e., μg/m 3 ), orders of magnitude lower than that of other contaminants.
Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced its decision to lower the MCL for PFAS to 4-10 ppt on average. One of the implications of this announcement is that almost all surface- and groundwater bodies within the U.S. are potentially considered contaminated with PFAS. As a result, the imposed federal requirements will attract national and global attention to this issue. This was not done in a vacuum but in the works for a while. The Infrastructure Bill had already allocated billions of dollars to target this long-awaited PFAS announcement and its implications.
I am the chair of the Geoenvironmental Engineering Technical Committee of the American Society of Civil Engineers and its Geo-institute and have a long track record of computational and experimental research on the detection and modeling of the fate and transport of PFAS, as well as the remediation of contaminated soil/groundwater in general and especially PFAS. Thus, a group of scientists at Cranfield Research Institute in the UK recently reached out to me to initiate a bilateral collaboration between the US and the UK.
Impact and Benefits:
This collaboration promises to enhance our university’s reputation as a global leader in the PFAS research field and environmental research in general. The event will provide our faculty and students with invaluable exposure to the state-of-the-art in PFAS research and national and international research networks, otherwise unavailable. The event’s agenda, to be finalized in the near future, is designed to have three distinct steps.
- Â On Day 1, faculty will share their expertise and knowledge with the public.
- On Day 2, the core group will break into groups to establish knowledge gaps, research needs, expertise overlaps, and complementary research expertise.
- On Day 3, potential requests for proposals in the U.S. and UK will be identified, and teams will be formed to initiate the summary page and proposal structure to be submitted to program directors in various funding agencies and solicit their opinions and interests. Target programs will include diverse groups of proposals at different levels such as initiative (idea) research proposals, regular research proposals, and larger (multimillion-dollar) funding programs such as Engineering Research Centers (ERC).
We believe, with your support, the event can mark the beginning of a significant and impactful research collaboration and make a difference on the Boise campus and globally. The event will help to develop a joint approach to address fundamental scientific knowledge gaps and potentially attract future funding and high-quality research to all institutions involved. The outcome will also potentially lead to the exchange of faculty and students among various partner universities. We are confident that the outcome will not only benefit Boise State but also contribute to solutions to the global concerns caused by PFAS contamination. This collaboration has the potential to push the boundaries of knowledge in exciting and innovative directions, maximizing our capabilities to sustainably tackle the global challenges imposed by PFAS contamination of the environment.
At the end of the meeting (on June 5th and 6th ), I had already arranged for a visit to two sites burned by wildfires in the McCall area. The core group has also shown interest in visiting the burned sites and investigating potential collaboration on wildfires.
For further information on attending this event, contact Arvin Farid at ArvinFarid@BoiseState.edu.