Grant: Research Tools and Instruments

<p>Funding is being requested to purchase a PerkinElmer Tri-Carb&reg; 4910TR Liquid Scintillation Counter. The Tri-Carb 4910TR is an ideal tool for my research because it can be used to quantify the radioactivity of ultra-low levels of carbon-14 and tritium in liquid samples. In the past 6 years, a Liquid Scintillation Counter (LSC) was essential to the publication of 60% of my refereed publications (n=29) and 40% of my total conference presentations (n=105). The nature of my research is that my students process, on average, more than 8,500 samples per year by an LSC. In the past 6 years, sixteen of my students (6PhD, 4MSc, 6BSc) required the use of an LSC in their projects. There is an urgency to this request. In the immediate future, my research team will no longer have access to the Beckman Coulter LS6500 that we are currently using because the manufacturer is phasing out its entire LSC product line. This means that the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission will not relicense the LS6500 when the current license expires on June 19, 2016. This is of great concern to my current students who rely on an LSC for their experiments. Without the Tri-Carb 4910TR in place, my current NSERC-DG research program will not be sustainable and my overall research productivity will decrease rapidly because my research team would have to stop all sorption and mineralization experiments which, in the past 10 years, have been the foundation of 31 refereed publications and 75 conference presentations. The Tri-Carb 4910TR will be used in my research that is advancing knowledge of the fate of organic chemicals in land and water systems, including current-use pesticides, steroidal estrogens, and antibiotics. The instrument will allow my students to continue to apply industry standard techniques to examine, in isolation, specific pathways of organic chemical dissipation. My ability to provide excellence in student training under my NSERC-DG program has been and is, directly related to me providing an LSC for their research. Over the past 6 years, five graduate students won a total of 11 monetary awards for their conference presentations that relied on data obtained using an LSC. The LSC allows me to attract graduate students to my research program who are awarded major scholarships, as well as undergraduate students who are awarded research assistantships, including 8 NSERC-Undergraduate Student Research Awards in the past six years. These students are being equipped with the specialized skills that Canadian and international employers are looking for. For example, radioisotope techniques are widely utilized by crop protection and pharmaceutical industries in research and development of new product lines. The Tri-Carb 4910TR will also be important to the research of my colleagues and their students in the Departments of Soil Science, Plant Science, Civil Engineering, Biosystems Engineering, Geological Sciences, and Biological Sciences.</p>