News and Events

Great NAMs workshop at King’s bringing many disciplines (chemists, biologists and computational scientists) together to tackle the challenges related to regulating pollution in the 21st Century. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSTVsKSLu7Y&ab_channel=ChristerHogstrand.

Deben Pollution and Citizen Science film. http://bit.ly/3k6aaP8. Great work by our student Ceri Archer, technician Svetlana Gretton, Open University student Vincent McGoldrick and Green Party councillor for Woodbridge Eamonn O’Nolan highlighting the presence of E.coli in Suffolk rivers.

Happy to announce a collaboration with with Malin Celander, University of Gothenburg on a project entitled “FishTox22 – Developing fish cell line-based toxtests to replace fish toxicity tests”

Happy to announce we have been awarded a Phase 1 grant to “.. to develop a suite of innovative, scalable bioassays for key adverse outcome pathways to replace in vivo fish studies in chemical safety screening and regulatory environmental risk assessment” with Christer Hogstrand (lead PI KCL), Charles Tyler (Exeter), Pete Kille (Cardiff), Luigi Margiotta-Casaluci (KCL) and Anders

“To flow or not to flow”: developing an artificial fish gill cell culture model for use in toxicology.

PhD opportunity – Development and application of a multi-component 3-D in vitro model for predictive pharmacokinetics of environmental pharmaceuticals in fish. In collaboration with Prof Christer Hogstrand and Dr Leon Barron (King’s College London) and Dr Stewart Owen (AstraZeneca) http://lido-dtp.ac.uk/hogstrand.html

Our recent study identified the presence of cocaine and other drugs of abuse in aquatic shrimps throughout rivers in Suffolk, which received widespread international media attention (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-48117678). Read more at Miller, T.H., Ng, K.T., Bury, S.T., Bury, S.E., Bury, N.R., Barron, L.P. 2019 Biomonitoring of pesticides, pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs in a freshwater invertebrate to

Awards at the Sustainable Ecological Engineering Design for Society Conference (SEEDS), September 2019 for Justine Oakes and Nic Bury of the Suffolk Sustainability Institute

Dr Elisabeth Chang – Elisabeth has successful defended her thesis entiteled “ Understadning movement of pharmaceuticals across rainbow trout gills using an in vitro gill cell culture”

Dr Anna Lavelle – Anna has successfully defended her thesis entitled “Stream ecocytem resposnse to restoration across urban tributaries of the River Thames, London”

The molecular descriptors that influence gill uptake of pharmaceuticals identified in a recent paper by Elisabeth Chang

Launch of the Suffolk Sustainability Institute – https://www.uos.ac.uk/content/suffolk-sustainability-institute

The overall objective of our research is to reduce the uncertainty related to the estimation of bioaccumulation of organic chemicals in fish in ecological risk assessment (ERA).

Presentations at SETAC Europe 27th Annual Meeting: “Environmental Quality Through Transdisciplinary Collaboration”, in Brussels, Belgium.

Dr. Jennifer Fitzgerald, from Dr Eduardo Santos group at the University of Exeter joins as a Post-doc on the CEFIC ECO34 grant.

This project will generate groundbreaking knowledge on the subtle effects of pharmaceuticals in the environment on a model freshwater benthic invertebrate, Gammarus pulex. As excellent indicators of surface water quality, these species are consistently impacted by pharmaceuticals and their metabolites at the ng-ug/L level mainly via sewage treatment plant effluents.

January, 2017: After 16 years at King’s, I have decided to embark on a new challenge and have taken up a position at the University of Suffolk in Ipswich. The research continues. I still have on-going projects at King’s in collaboration with Prof Christer Hogstrand and Dr. Mike Chadwick and over the coming few years

Tom Miller, current PhD student with Dr. Leon Barron, gave two excellent talks on his recent work assessing pharmaceutical uptake in Gammarus pulex Bioconcentration and biotransformation of selected pharmaceuticals in the freshwater amphipod

It is acknowledged that biotransformation is an uncertainty when estimating the bioaccumulation of organic chemicals. The aim of the current project is to develop in vitro methods, that include models of the gill, gut and liver as well as cell lines, as a rapid assessment for uptake and biotransformation pathways of chemicals.

The Sparking Impact competition invited researchers at King’s to submit a project proposal that develops the impact of a current BBSRC project with the aim to develop project management skills, particularly in young researchers. This prize, awarded to Lucy Stott and Nic Bury, was for their project that aimed to promote the use of alternative

New research from the University of Exeter and King’s College London has shown how a population of brown trout can survive in the contaminated waters of the River Hayle in Cornwall where metal concentrations are so high they would be lethal to fish from unpolluted sites. The team believe this is due to changes in

Contaminated during the surrounding area’s history of mining, the River Hayle in Cornwall contains metals including copper, zinc, nickel and cadmium at levels that can kill brown trout, a particularly sensitive species. It comes as a surprise, then, that brown trout in this river show no obvious signs of toxicity and are apparently flourishing. We