Rutgers student Charlene Guo hiked in Saxon Switzerland National Park near Dresden, Germany, in July. Photo:
Kelvin Zhou.
Charlene Guo, an Honors College senior and environmental science major attending the Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences (SEBS), spent her summer in Germany conducting research on environmental contamination with heavy metals.
Guo was one of two Rutgers University-New Brunswick students to study in Germany over the summer as part of the Research Internships in Science and Engineering (RISE) Germany program overseen by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).
Taking her research overseas to an unfamiliar setting was an opportunity she couldn’t resist.
Rutgers student Charlene Guo adds uranine (a fluorescent dye) dissolved in water into a well to track groundwater flow in June. Photo: Lily Sherman.
“This is a complex issue that goes beyond borders and requires large-scale collaboration, so I wanted to establish international connections, learn to adapt to research in completely new settings and explore heavy metal contamination from mining, which is a source I hadn’t studied before in my research,” said Guo, 21, of Westbury, N.Y. “Mining leaves behind waste material that can leach metals into soil and water long after they’re extracted and is a major source of heavy metal contamination worldwide.”
At Rutgers, Guo researches human exposure to lead contamination from sources such as tap water and spices. In Germany, she shifted her focus to sediments and expanded her work to a broader range of heavy metals and metalloids such as arsenic, cadmium and iron.
As a research intern at Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg (TUBAF for short, or the Freiberg University of Mining and Technology) in Saxony, Germany, Guo used complexing agents – chemical compounds that bond to metal ions to form stable structures – to remediate mining-contaminated sediment for reuse in the construction and agriculture industries.
“Because the metals are locked away in these structures, they can essentially be ‘washed away’ from the sediment, which could potentially allow it to be safely repurposed instead of being sent to waste,” she said.
Outside of her research, Guo attended classes at the technical university and went on field studies and field trips, including going underground into the school’s research mine and “analyzing groundwater flow through tracer testing.”
Challenges such as laboratory access constraints and redoing or adjusting her experiments because of “unexpected results” added to Guo’s learning experience.
“I had to stay flexible yet prioritize steps that would keep the integrity of my data while balancing that with the time constraints of the internship,” Guo said. “Troubleshooting is honestly just as much a part of research as the experiment itself, and being able to adapt quickly ended up being one of the more useful skills I walked away with.”
Rutgers student Charlene Guo poses in front of signs at the Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg in Saxony, Germany, in August. Photo: Tara Kasayapanand.
Guo, who spent her weekends abroad traveling to the Czech Republic, Poland, Austria, Hungary and various German cities, said the RISE Germany program proved “a great way to bridge my environmentally focused coursework to my research interests.”
A moment that captured the value of participating in the RISE Germany program “was realizing how much mining is a part of daily life in Freiberg,” Guo said.
“People still greet each other with ‘Glück auf,’ the old miners’ greeting, and there’s an annual folk festival called Bergstadtfest built around mining heritage, with the hammer-and-pick symbol everywhere you look,” she said. “Seeing my research as something embedded so deeply in a real place and a real community is the reason I want to keep doing this work.”
After graduating from Rutgers, Guo plans to pursue a doctoral degree and work as a research scientist in environmental contamination.
Guo’s story was extracted from a larger Rutgers Today story.
