OUR LATEST NEWS
2025
- Welcome to Yuanyuan Wang as a postdoctoral researcher; Almat Kabyl and Quyen Tran as PhD students; Guntaash Brar and Sandesh Rana as MS.c students!
2024
- October: The EnIGMA group attended the Canadian Ecotoxicity Workshop in Kitchener in early October. Ashlyn gave a presentation on the fate, distribution, bioaccumulation potential, and risk assessment of REEs in aquatic ecosystems post-exposure to REE-coagulants. David presented the geochemistry of Critical Elements in Ontario Rivers. Ruby gave an interesting talk on the assessment of agricultural soil geochemistry and REE concentrations across farm and production types in Southern Ontario. Minh discussed the accumulation and translocation of REEs in rice plants.
It was a good three-day conference where we learned about others' projects, networked and had good conversations with the government sectors and industrial partners.
- June: Congratulations to Scott Stebbing on being awarded the Peter & Karen Barrett Environmental Chemistry Prize for outstanding performance in Environmental Chemistry courses. Congratulations to Jack Lahey, who was selected as the recipient of the Graham Hartley Prize in Second Year for 2023/2024 for the highest mark in second-year chemistry, and also received the C3 Host College Student Scholarship from College Chemistry Canada.
Well-deserved achievements to Scott and Jack!
- May: Welcome Jack Lahey (USRA awardee) and Yinan Yang (research assistant) to join our lab for the summer. We had a fun get-together to welcome our new members and celebrate Shivani's B.Sc graduation.
- April: Congratulations to David for successfully converting his MSc into a PhD!
2023
- December: Dr. Huy Dang and the ENIGMA team attended the annual IIES conference, this time in Chile. ENIGMA students presented their research at the conference in Santiago and at the Graduate Student Forum in Puerto Montt. See Gallery.
- October: ENIGMA Team and 3 other research groups at Trent visited Vietnam, travelled across six provinces to share knowledge and discuss with researchers at Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology on field sampling, environmental issues; and initiated future international collaborations. Trent News and Gallery
- September: Welcome Kaileigh Wright (MS.c), Sam Gottschalk and Shivani Nadkarni (honor thesis students).
2022
- October: Dr. Huy Dang and the ENIGMA team attended the International Institute for Environmental Studies (IIES) conference in Vietnam. The 2-day conference in Ho Chi Minh City was followed by the Graduate Student Forum on the island of Phu Quoc, where graduate students shared their work and built collaborative connections through the 5-minute presentations and field trips.
- September: Welcome David Boettcher to join us as an MS.c student to work on rare earth and critical elements in Ontario Rivers.
- May: Dr. Huy Dang and the ENIGMA team are recipients of the 2022 Trent University Research Impact Award, which honors Trent researchers or research teams stewarding original and impactful research that has contributed significantly to society on a local, regional, national or international scale.
- May: Two recent publications on the winter geochemistry of Platinum (Marine Chemistry) and capacity to disentangle the anthropogenic emissions from natural processes in the River, Estuary and Gulf of St. Lawrence (Water Research) are now online. See Publications.
2021
- December: Several of our articles are published including the data obtained from the winter oceanographic cruise on the Estuary and Gulf of St. Lawrence, the U isotope record in Neotproterozoic marine shales (0.6-1.0 Ga), and other works (see Publications).
- September: Welcome to Ruby Wetzl to join us as a MSc student to work on rare earth elements in agricultural soils of Ontario.
- August: Our latest publication in a collaboration with colleagues from the First Institute of Oceanography (China) investigates how hydrothermal vents affect the geochemistry of the elements in the Okinawa Trough.
- June/July: Our latest articles (3) are now online, see Publications. They addressed either the history of water contamination in the Thi Vai River (Vietnam) or rare earth elements contamination associated with past U mining history in Ontario (Canada). In this light, the latest publication reviewed the Abundance, Extraction, Applications, and Environmental Impacts of rare earth elements and develop circularity concepts for future development of these critical elements in our high-tech and low-carbon economy.
- June: Welcome to Ashlyn Kernaghan and Minh Duong to join us as summer research associates this summer and graduate students in the upcoming semesters.
- May: Trent News featuring ENIGMA research and Huy's nomination in the Vietnam’s top 20 under 35: https://www.trentu.ca/news/story/30209
- April: Our latest article on the role of tropical mangrove forests in governing the biogeochemistry of rare earth elements is now online. This is the first work redefining the role of this atypical ecosystem wrt the dissolved loading of the elements.
2020
- Trent News featuring ENIGMA research and Huy's Golden Globe in Science and Technology for Early Career Scientists: https://www.trentu.ca/news/story/28771
- Anique is onboard the Amundsen icebreaker for a sampling trip (Feb 28 to March 14, 2020); she collected water, suspended particles and biological samples to investigate biogeochemical cycles of nutrients and emergent pollutants in the Saint-Lawrence river in Winter.
See the CBC-Info broadcast.
- Our most recent publication on novel thiomolybdate species is published on Talanta. We showed a few series of reactions between molybdenum and sulfides using advanced mass spectrometry.
- We just published an article on how kinetic models could be applied for the geochemistry of pollutants, especially for the release of Pb from contaminated sediments during resuspension events. This article is in memory of our dear colleague and friend, Cedric Garnier.
2019
- Welcome to Anique Chatzis who will join us as an MSc student (2019-2021).
- Welcome to Hang Nguyen and Rose Zhang who will join us as summer students (July-August 2019).