Lisa Brown, Ph.D. Candidate, Geoenvironmental Engineering at the University of Alberta 

Lisa Brown, Ph.D. Candidate, Geoenvironmental Engineering at the University of Alberta

I’m Lisa. I’m an environmental engineer and I’m working on my PhD and I’m trying to learn as much as I can about microbiology because my project is about understanding the microbial communities that are present in tailings ponds.

There is actually micro-organisms that survive the conditions in the ponds and we’re trying to figure out what’s there and what their capacity is for degrading the organics.

Previous research has shown that it’s actually very difficult for them to do so, so I’m actually looking at coupling chemical oxidation with bio-remediation to see if that will speed up the process.

So we take oil samples as well as water samples and look at the chemistry, the microbiology, etcetera, to see what kind of changes may or may not be happening. The interesting thing about this research is that it not only applies to the oil sands, but I can take the principles that I’ve learned and apply them to different remediation problems, such as brown field sites around cities.

It’s fascinating to be sort of on the edge of knowledge and really push yourself and the field in terms of what we know. It’s really, really important that we figure out these issues.

There’s a lot of people at the University, in government, in industry working on these issues to try and figure out the best approach moving forward.