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Short Biography
Kimberly Gray is the Kay Davis Professor and Chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northwestern University. She has a secondary appointment in the Dept. of Chemical and Biological Engineering and is also a member of the Center for Catalysis and Surface Science and the Transportation Center. She is a faculty affiliate of the Searle Center on Law, Regulation, and Economic Growth in the Pritzker School of Law at Northwestern. After receiving her Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University she worked as a research engineer for the Lyonnaise des Eaux in Paris, France for 2 years. Her areas of expertise are environmental catalysis and physicochemical processes in natural and engineered environmental systems with particular focus on energy and sustainability applications. She works closely with the Chicago Legal Clinic to provide technical expertise to solve environmental problems for low-income urban communities and has recently expanded this endeavor to include Chicago area NGOs and environmental start-up companies. She is the author of over 130 scientific papers and lectures widely on energy, climate and environmental issues.
Abstract
Over the last 10 – 15 years the number of products containing nanomaterials (NMs) has grown exponentially, particularly in food and personal care products. Nanotitania (n-TiO2) and nano-silver (n-Ag) are among the materials used most frequently for their antimicrobial properties, although n-TiO2 is also used as a white pigment. A decade’s worth of research into the unintended impacts of NMs in the environment or on human health has convinced many health experts that NMs hold negligible unintended risks to human or ecological health. Yet, at the same time, n-TiO2, typically regarded as benign, is being considered as a carcinogen in the EU. Our work has detailed the phototoxicity of n-TiO2 in environmental media and its potential harm to ecological goods and services. In addition, we have probed NM mixtures created with n-TiO2 and various plasmonic NM, principally n-Ag, but including n-Au and n-Pt, to show that biological stress effects are greater with mixtures, than with the parent materials alone and to reveal that these synergistic interactions are explained by the self-assembly of new composite materials under environmental conditions.