How can microorganisms help restore ecosystems affected by mining activities?

Join this year’s iGEM team for a panel discussion with experts about exciting new ways in which microbes can be engineered for wastewater remediation, and how these tools can help local communities. 

How can you participate? Join us in person or online by registering for the Zoom Meeting or watching live on YouTube!

Have questions? Send them to info.4@concordia.ca

Joshua Mogil

Joshua Mogil is an environmental engineer with a broad experience base in brownfield remediation, metallurgy, mineral processing, and green construction. He currently works for Mantle Developments, a climate consulting firm that focuses on embodied carbon emissions in the real estate sector.

He completed his undergraduate degree in materials engineering at McGill. He then continued on to his master’s degree in civil engineering at the University of Toronto, exploring the potential use of fungi for the remediation of volatile organic compounds and avoiding carbon-intensive pump-and-treat solutions. Seeking low-carbon alternatives for current problems has been a driver for him throughout his career. Before starting at Mantle, he worked as a Technology Analyst at Emerald Technology Ventures, a greentech venture capital firm, in which he collaborated with startups at the forefront of innovation in electrification, polymer synthesis, materials, and water purification.

Beth Davenport

Beth completed an MSc at Imperial College London in Applied Biosciences and Biotechnology where she came first in her cohort. Here, she specialized in Synthetic Biology; in particular, designing DNA constructs to be less toxic to cells that harbor them, and in continuous evolution systems for evolving proteins for particular functions.

Before her Msc, Beth read Natural Sciences in her undergraduate degree at Durham University, UK. Here, she majored in Molecular Biology and minored in Geography and Climate Science. She has a passion for the intersection between these subjects, specifically in biotechnological applications for mitigating environmental and climate issues. Beth spent her summers working in a Molecular Plant Biology Lab, where she hunted for vascular cambium genes in the crop Barley that could help increase biofuel yields when transferred to other crops.

Beth also used her third year to study abroad in Vancouver at the UBC. It was during this time that she studied under Dr. Steven Hallam, who runs a lab at the interface of Microbial Ecology, Biological Engineering, and Bioinformatics. Today, Beth is in her third year PhD in the Hallam Lab. She is developing a microbial platform for protein display that is safe, recyclable, cheap and easy to use, even in polluted settings. Toxic heavy metals polluting water and ecosystems is a side effect of mining. Searching the mining microbiome, like Dr. Hallam’s Lab is doing in affiliation with the Bradshaw Institute for minerals and mining (BRIMM), and the Mining Microbiome Analytics Platform (M-MAP), may identify proteins that have evolved to bind such toxic metals. Any interesting proteins can be identified and displayed on her platform to recover toxic metals from water samples and the like. The aim of this is to use the platform to bioremediate polluted environments, removing metal contaminants in a sustainable way.

Chad Hughes

Chad Hughes is the Executive Director of the Elk River Alliance, a community-based Environmental Charity focused on water monitoring, education, outreach, and restoration on the Elk River, BC. Chad graduated in the mid 2000’s from the University of Western Australia with a B.Sc (Env. Sci.), and started an environmental career in the mineral resource industry surveying ecosystems across the Outback. Focusing on arid shrubland communities over a range of mineral interests, Chad conducted vegetation inventory, rare taxon surveys and impact assessments, along the way developing an interest in the processes behind ecosystem change, human-ecological interactions and impact mitigation. A several year working vacation in South America ignited a desire for topography and colder climates, so in 2014 Chad moved to British Columbia and briefly returned to environmental field with an indigenous development company, primarily contracting to a local coal mines.

After volunteering with the Elk River Alliance (ERA), Chad took a position managing the organisation’s Community-Based Water Monitoring Program, and spearheaded the development of a hydrological station network, sediment investigation project and a landscape-level riparian and floodplain restoration program. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Chad took on the Executive Director position, resulting in a newfound love of grant applications and organizational management. Chad resides in Fernie, BC and enjoys mountain biking, river and outdoor pursuits, writing emails, antagonizing his funders and reviewing timesheets.