LONG
Barbara Sherwood Lollar conducts transformative research on carbon-based groundwater pollutants using compound specific isotope analysis, of which she is a pioneer and is revolutionizing the monitoring of these priority contaminants. Her work enables multiple sources of pollutants to be identified and their transport and degradation to be quantified. In a 2002 breakthrough paper in Nature, her group showed that hydrocarbon gases from deep within the Earth’s crust are produced from the same kinds of abiogenic reactions as those in meteorites thus contributing essential new data to our understanding of the deep biosphere and the origin of petroleum.

SHORT
Barbara Sherwood Lollar conducts transformative research on carbon-based groundwater pollutants using compound specific isotope analysis. Her group has shown that hydrocarbon gases from deep within the Earth’s crust are produced from the same kinds of abiogenic reactions as those in meteorites thus contributing to our understanding of the deep biosphere and the origin of petroleum.