Professor wins national grant for coastal study

     Dr. Dave Bachoon and his team of researchers have recently been chosen to receive a prestigious and highly competitive grant in March 2008 for approximately $152,552 to fund the continuation of research on coastal pollution.
     The Sea Grant College Program is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and periodically awards grants to researchers and scientists in several coastal-barring states, also including Puerto Rico and Guam.
     This grant program is highly competitive in the state of Georgia with Bachoon and GCSU up against such big-name research universities as Unversity of Georgia and Georgia Tech.
     The NOAA Sea Grant is typically used to “explore pressing issues related to the health and sustained well-being of our coasts and coastal economies,” according to its website. Bachoon’s research fits perfectly into this theme of priority. His research involves the source detection of fecal pollution in coastal waters. Such pollution has been known to kill coral reefs and destroy marine environments.
     In 2004, Bachoon, who is the principle investigator, and his team received a similar grant that was used to fund research that helped develop a new method for detecting fecal pollution from human biological waste in coastal areas and other waterways. The method that they developed, with the help of the grant, has been used in many ways including being used to detect fecal pollution in flood zones and waterways that were devastated by hurricane Katrina.
     According to Bachoon, previously existing methods for detecting fecal pollution are time consuming and long, but, through much research and hard work, he and his team have developed a much quicker method that he believes is just as accurate. His method is a molecular and DNA based technique.
     The most recent grant will be used to fund a project that is intended to prove and establish his new method of detection that was developed using the previous grant. They want to prove that their method is accurate and reliable. The new research is simply an extension of that which began back in 2004. He hopes to “use the results to help fix the problem and to help apply for additional funding.”
     Bachoon and his team plan to take water samples from nearby locations of the coast of Georgia, as well as locations near Trinidad, and the Caribbean.
     By studying the water samples and using their new method of fecal pollution detection, he and his team hope to find the source of pollution at those chosen locations.
     Bachoon says that possible sources could be poor or damaged sewage systems, or runoff from coastal urban sites. If a source can be determined, action can be taken to prevent such pollution and could help conserve marine wildlife such as coral reefs.
     The funding from this grant will last for two years, ending in 2010. During that time, Bachoon wants to include students in his research, allowing them to travel to the various testing sites.
GCSU is also partnering with the University of Puerto Rico and the University of the West Indies. Bachoon is excited about the possibilities for conservation efforts in the future and believes that this research “has a chance to lead to bigger things.”

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Nov 9 2007. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry