Daniel Alessi is a low-temperature geochemist, and studies the transport and remediation of metal and organic contamination. Predicting the fate and transport of contaminants in the environment is often difficult because there is a large disconnect between well-understood but relatively simple laboratory systems – for example, metal adsorption onto the surface of a particular pure mineral in pure water – and the complex contaminant interactions observed with natural geologic media. This complexity is so great that designing perfect predictive models is impractical. The goal of my research is to determine the types of minerals, organisms, dissolved substances, redox processes, and physical soil or aquifer parameters that control the fate of a contaminant, and using these data design useful predictive models of contaminant distribution
