2015 Environment Division Research and Development Dima Award
Date: 03-07-2016
Congratulations to the 2015 Environment Division Research and Development Dima Award winner:
Dr. Frank R. Wania
University of Toronto
Frank Wania studied environmental science at the University Bayreuth in Germany and received his doctorate in chemical engineering and applied chemistry from the University of Toronto in 1995. After two years as a scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Air Research, and three years as an independent researcher, he joined the University of Toronto at Scarborough in 1999. He has wide-ranging research interests related to environmental contaminant fate, with a focus on gaining a mechanistic understanding of contaminant enrichment processes through a combination of fieldwork, laboratory experimentation and model simulations. In particular, he has made important contributions to understanding and quantifying cold-trapping phenomena of persistent organic pollutants on a global scale and along elevation gradients in mountains. He also worked on characterizing the role of snow in the environmental fate of organic pollutants and the experimental determination and prediction of chemical properties of environmental relevance. Current research activities deal with the development and application of passive air sampling techniques, the use of deterministic models to quantify and assign sources of variability in the contaminant exposure observed in human and wildlife biomonitoring studies, and the quantification and graphical representation of the atmospheric phase distribution of compounds involved in secondary organic aerosol formation.
