General News
Our Research Is Making Maine Communities Safer
- March 4, 2025
I first came to science out of curiosity about the natural world around me. I grew up exploring wooded areas behind my home in suburban New Jersey, wondering about the living things around me, and how everything came to be.
I studied biology in high school and as an undergraduate at Penn State and eventually entered graduate school still pursuing elusive questions about the origins of life and evolutionary pathways that led to the amazing diversity of life on earth.
Post-doctoral work at The Jackson Laboratory brought me to Bar Harbor, Maine. In the middle of my research career, I decided to go back to the roots of my interest in science and become a high school science teacher, to instill in young students the same love of the science that I had discovered in the wooded areas behind by home.
My students and I joined a new initiative in Maine called Partners in Monitoring (PIM), which paired local non-profits with high schools to accomplish important environmental goals, like identifying sources of bacterial pollution impacting recreational swim areas and economically important shellfish harvesting areas along the coast of Maine.
So began a new area of research for me and a new approach to science that included community engagement, partnerships with state agencies and non-governmental organizations, and working with those people most affected by our research, in our case, local businesses, shellfish harvesters and hard-working families.
My students and I received the SeaWorld Busch Gardens Environmental Excellence Award in 1998, which allowed us to launch a new non-profit aimed at engaging people of all ages in meaningful research and education to preserve and improve the water quality of coastal waters.
By 2000, we needed a year-round research and training laboratory. Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory provided that space, recognizing the importance of citizen engagement in science and the relationship between clean water and human health.
And so began my next career phase, as I took on the role of executive director of the MDI Water Quality Coalition over the next seven years. I have been at MDI Biological Laboratory ever since, joining the scientific staff in 2009, becoming Director of Education in 2015, and eventually joining the research faculty in 2022.
My work has expanded into groundwater quality and impacts of contaminated drinking water on human health. Since 2016, with funding from EPA and NIH SEPA, we have engaged 32 teachers and over 5,000 students from across Maine and New Hampshire as citizen scientists in collecting more than 4,500 drinking water samples from homes for analysis of arsenic and other toxic metals often found in groundwater in these states.
Nearly 25% of all water samples had elevated levels of metals and countless families have been spared early onset of diseases of aging such as cardiovascular disease and cancer because of the knowledge they gained and actions they took as a result of this science education program. The outcomes of this on-going program (that we call All About Arsenic or AAA) were recently published in Environmental Health Perspectives, the journal of the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences. In an Invited Perspective published alongside our article, authors Yoshira Ornelas Van Horne and Anne E. Nigra, both also NIH supported researchers, had this to say:
“The wheel does not need to be reinvented; the AAA model can be adapted to serve the needs of communities with a variety of other environmental health concerns, including air pollution, extractive industries, industrial contamination, and toxic chemicals in personal care products. The impressive success of the AAA program on influencing public health policy and improving environmental data equity serves as proof that involving youth engagement and community-based citizen science in scientific research programs is well worth the investment.”
More and more, communities throughout Maine have turned to us for help with drinking water contamination issues. We have launched new programs to address per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in drinking water.
We have found that rural schools with septic systems are leaching PFAS into groundwater, not only contaminating their own drinking water sources, but also private wells on neighboring properties. We have alerted state agencies to these discoveries and people have received help with mitigation of their contaminated wells. We published our findings, again in Environmental Health Perspectives in December 2024, to ensure that other communities become aware of this unexpected source of PFAS contamination of drinking water in private wells.
If MDIBL were no longer here, all of the groundwork that we have laid in addressing human health issues related to drinking water quality over the last decade will be lost. Local communities that have come to depend on MDIBL to lead the way on community health issues will be without resources. The models we are developing will never come to fruition.
In Maine alone, over 60 communities with schools that have been identified as having high PFAS in their drinking water, will never reap the benefits of the research currently going on. We are just scratching the surface of the PFAS contamination issue in rural Maine.
Recently, we submitted an R01 grant to NIEHS to fund community engaged research in one Maine community that is particularly impacted by PFAS. In preliminary studies of over 60 private wells, we found PFAS in 73% of samples. In addition, the local elementary school was found to have PFAS in drinking water above Maine state standards for public water systems.
The community is concerned about the health of their children, and together with researchers at Dartmouth College, we have proposed to look at associations between PFAS levels in the school drinking water, home drinking water, and blood PFAS levels in children and measures of neurobehavioral and cardiometabolic health. This type of study has not been done before and, if funded, will create a model for community engagement, data collection, communication of exposures, and community action.
Because the community is ready and willing to get started on this project, MDIBL has committed private funds to collect preliminary data on 20 families, to establish protocols and pave the way for full community engagement when the R01 is funded.
On the personal effects of cuts in federal funding for our work: Personally, my family depends on my income. My husband is retired and disabled and completely dependent on me. My programs also supports younger families; I have a full-time coordinator managing the NIH SEPA grant and a full-time outreach specialist working across both the NIH SEPA program with our teachers across two states, and the PFAS project in our local communities. I also have a full time post-doctoral researcher supported by my lab. All three of these people, committed to the health of our communities, would be unemployed if MDI Bio Lab was not here.
It has been my plan to work with community partners across rural Maine to reach other affected communities who are unaware of how plumes of PFAS are moving through the groundwater from contaminated school campuses and into neighboring private wells.
In this current new research path, I have taken the opportunity to test my own home well. As it turns out, I too have PFAS in my drinking water. I have lived in the same house for 30 years; it is difficult to know when my well was contaminated or how long my exposure has been, but I have installed a whole house filtration system to reduce my family’s exposure to these harmful toxic chemicals.
I also tested my own blood for PFAS with a new test kit developed by Eurofins (a global company that provides laboratory testing and services for a variety of industries), a kit that we plan to use in our studies described above. I discovered that the profile of PFAS in my blood is highly correlated with the profile of PFAS in my drinking water (a Spearman’s Rho of 0.94).
There is one article in the literature affirming that under some circumstances, paired samples of blood and drinking water are correlated for PFAS profiles. Our research in local communities, testing drinking water sources and blood PFAS levels in children will help to establish the relationship between drinking water and blood PFAS levels; this knowledge will help families assess risk and make decisions about mitigation of exposures and follow-up health screening for family members.
So often, I hear people with PFAS in their drinking water say that they don’t want to know the PFAS levels in their blood. It may well be that it reflects what is in their drinking water. We have more work to do in this area to help people understand what it means to have high PFAS in their drinking water.
There is the potential, with loss of funding, that all of this work will grind to a halt, just as we are gaining new understanding of how PFAS moves in local environments, the exposure risks for residents with PFAS in their drinking water, and the impacts on child health.
In addition, the many teachers and students who are currently engaged in our NIH SEPA program rely on our leadership in the All About Arsenic project. We fund teachers to participate in professional development activities and to invest extra time in managing and shipping water samples, managing classroom data, order materials and supplies, and engage their students in the All About Arsenic project. All samples are analyzed at the Trace Element Analysis Lab at Dartmouth College, so the data are reliable and provide actionable information for families. This program has not only educated thousands of students, but it has also informed hundreds of families about toxic metals in their drinking water. One parent had this to say:
“My [child] came home and told us that we were at 50 [ppb] for arsenic after the first test so we put a filter on the drinking water and this 2nd test has us at 0.02. We never would have known if you hadn’t done this program.”
I worry about all of the families we will miss if our research were to end prematurely.