Teresa Mathews

My research interests center around anthropogenic impacts on the environment and their subsequent consequences for public health.  While my thesis deals with metal trophic transfer, I have also been involved with projects considering such issues as eutrophication and harmful algal blooms, and have worked in both freshwater and marine ecosystems.  I consider public outreach and education to be an important component to my work. 

I am interested in exploring metal biomagnification in marine food webs, focusing on higher trophic levels such as carnivorous fish.  Most metal trophic transfer studies focus on the base of the aquatic food web (phytoplankton, zooplankton), but rarely consider the dynamics of metal transfer to fish, even though the consumption of metal contaminated fish can pose serious health risks to humans.   In my research, I have tried to take an integrative approach, learning basic principles from controlled laboratory experiments, and then trying to apply these principles to what we observe in the natural environment.

In addition to the work I have done at MSRC, I have had the opportunity to do radiotracer experiments at the International Atomic Energy Agency Marine Environmental Laboratory (IAEA-MEL) in Monaco, where I was able to do studies to assess the assimilation and loss of metals from phytoplankton, zooplankton, and eventually in 4 different species of top level predator fish.  The data generated from these lab experiments will be used in a kinetic modeling study to predict the relative potential of metals to biomagnify in marine food chains.  These predictions are now being tested against independently derived field data in which metal concentrations are measured via ICP-MS in organisms from different trophic levels in both contaminated and pristine sites in the Mediterranean.

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