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In Memoriam: The Scientific Legacy of Dr. Katherine T. Peter
The open source paper I'll reference in this post is this one: In Memoriam: The Scientific Legacy of Dr. Katherine T. Peter David M. Cwiertny, Edward P. Kolodziej, Gabrielle P. Black, John Kucklick, Ruth Marfil-Vega, Andrew D. McEachran, Benjamin J. Place, Jessica L. Reiner, and Alix E. Rodowa Environmental Science & Technology Article ASAP.
Dr. Peter was one of the discoverers of the fact that an antioxidant in tires, 6-PPD Quinone, when solubilized in rainwater or snow melt that flows into streams is responsible for the deaths of Coho Salmon and other fish species in streams and rivers near roadways.
She died recently as a young woman, from misdiagnosed cancer, the symptoms of which were attributed to her pregnancy with her only child.
Some excerpts:
We sadly report the untimely passing of Dr. Katherine T. Peter (affectionately known as “Kathy”) on November 4, 2024, as a result of early onset colorectal cancer (EOCRC). During her all too short research career, Kathy worked on novel materials for water treatment and the development of advanced mass spectrometry tools for environmental characterization, treatment, and human health assessment. Here, those of us so touched and inspired by Kathy’s brilliance as a friend, collaborator, and researcher seek to recognize and communicate her scientific and personal accomplishments as we celebrate her intellectual legacy. Simply put, she was the very best of us...
...Kathy’s career started in the Department of Energy, Environmental and Chemical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. There, she conducted undergraduate research in the laboratory of Dr. John Fortner, broadly in the area of environmental nanotechnology. Her contributions led to her first peer-reviewed publication in ES&T Letters, exploring the photo-oxidation of hydrogenated fullerenes in water. (1) Kathy was an accomplished student, earning a perfect 4.0 GPA while attaining her Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering (valedictorian of the College of Engineering while double majoring in Spanish) and playing for the university softball team...
Kathy then pursued a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Iowa through support from the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. At Iowa, Kathy continued her work on environmental nanotechnology, crafting her thesis around the application of electrospun nanofibers in point-of-use water treatment. Her work was motivated by the numerous challenges confronting Iowa’s private well owners, where over 300,000 vulnerable consumers fall outside of Safe Drinking Water Act protections and often need multifunctional, broad-spectrum purification technologies in a small device footprint...
...During Kathy’s first stint at CUW (2016–2019), almost the entire research group was focused on the compelling question of: what was killing Pacific Northwest coho salmon during fall rainstorms? To understand observations of recurrent acute mortality, the CUW lab was using environmental mass spectrometry tools to characterize and track the chemical composition of roadway runoff, urban stormwater, and associated receiving waters. This unifying theme and focus on discovery science initiated an integrated effort to apply comparative HRMS analysis to roadway runoff, small creek receiving waters, and associated treatment systems. It also motivated the development of source tracking and fingerprinting tools that could be used to compare and characterize water quality degradation and dynamics during the storm events where coho salmon would perish. This was all done in conjunction with parallel toxicology studies led by Dr. Jen McIntyre (Washington State University) and Dr. Nat Scholz (NOAA-NMFS).
Kathy quickly became an intellectual and organizational leader and driving force of many research and analytical studies to better understand urban water quality and associated chemodynamics. For example, CUW was working with citizen science and community groups to enable sampling of receiving waters where symptomatic coho salmon were observed during rain events. Kathy enhanced and initiated collaborations with several community groups, including Puget Soundkeeper, the Thornton Creek Alliance, and especially the Miller-Walker Community Salmon Investigation located on Miller Creek in Burien/Normandy Park WA, USA...
...Due to Kathy’s involvement, the water quality infrastructure and enthusiastic citizen science collaborations have led to multiple water quality and toxicology studies at Miller Creek which is representative of small, roadway runoff-impacted watersheds. After the initial 2018 Miller Creek publication, Kathy worked to define the chemodynamics of roadway runoff impacts on small riverine watersheds, demonstrating that tire chemicals can be abundant enough to be transport-limited environmental contaminants and defining exposure periods and sampling strategies needed to better understand transient water quality degradation during storm events. (13)...
...Kathy’s career started in the Department of Energy, Environmental and Chemical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. There, she conducted undergraduate research in the laboratory of Dr. John Fortner, broadly in the area of environmental nanotechnology. Her contributions led to her first peer-reviewed publication in ES&T Letters, exploring the photo-oxidation of hydrogenated fullerenes in water. (1) Kathy was an accomplished student, earning a perfect 4.0 GPA while attaining her Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering (valedictorian of the College of Engineering while double majoring in Spanish) and playing for the university softball team...
Kathy then pursued a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Iowa through support from the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. At Iowa, Kathy continued her work on environmental nanotechnology, crafting her thesis around the application of electrospun nanofibers in point-of-use water treatment. Her work was motivated by the numerous challenges confronting Iowa’s private well owners, where over 300,000 vulnerable consumers fall outside of Safe Drinking Water Act protections and often need multifunctional, broad-spectrum purification technologies in a small device footprint...
...During Kathy’s first stint at CUW (2016–2019), almost the entire research group was focused on the compelling question of: what was killing Pacific Northwest coho salmon during fall rainstorms? To understand observations of recurrent acute mortality, the CUW lab was using environmental mass spectrometry tools to characterize and track the chemical composition of roadway runoff, urban stormwater, and associated receiving waters. This unifying theme and focus on discovery science initiated an integrated effort to apply comparative HRMS analysis to roadway runoff, small creek receiving waters, and associated treatment systems. It also motivated the development of source tracking and fingerprinting tools that could be used to compare and characterize water quality degradation and dynamics during the storm events where coho salmon would perish. This was all done in conjunction with parallel toxicology studies led by Dr. Jen McIntyre (Washington State University) and Dr. Nat Scholz (NOAA-NMFS).
Kathy quickly became an intellectual and organizational leader and driving force of many research and analytical studies to better understand urban water quality and associated chemodynamics. For example, CUW was working with citizen science and community groups to enable sampling of receiving waters where symptomatic coho salmon were observed during rain events. Kathy enhanced and initiated collaborations with several community groups, including Puget Soundkeeper, the Thornton Creek Alliance, and especially the Miller-Walker Community Salmon Investigation located on Miller Creek in Burien/Normandy Park WA, USA...
...Due to Kathy’s involvement, the water quality infrastructure and enthusiastic citizen science collaborations have led to multiple water quality and toxicology studies at Miller Creek which is representative of small, roadway runoff-impacted watersheds. After the initial 2018 Miller Creek publication, Kathy worked to define the chemodynamics of roadway runoff impacts on small riverine watersheds, demonstrating that tire chemicals can be abundant enough to be transport-limited environmental contaminants and defining exposure periods and sampling strategies needed to better understand transient water quality degradation during storm events. (13)...
Dr. Peters was an expert in "NTA" "nontargeted analysis" using high resolution mass spec.
All of humanity can be thankful that her too short life came to pass, and grieve that that life, well lived, ended too soon.
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