Paul Tratnyek

Affiliation

Oregon Health & Science University

Track

Biography

Dr. Paul G. Tratnyek currently is a Professor in the School of Public Health at the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, OR. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Chemistry from the Colorado School of Mines in 1987; served as a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Laboratory in Athens, GA, in 1988; and as a Research Associate at the Swiss Federal Institute for Water Resources and Water Pollution Control (EAWAG) from 1989 to 1991. In 1991, Tratnyek joined the faculty in the Department of Environmental Science and Engineering at the Oregon Graduate Institute (OGI) where he became involved in OGI’s Center for Groundwater Research and the University Consortium Solvents-In-Groundwater research program based at the University of Waterloo. Through that connection, he became involved in research on zerovalent iron (ZVI) for remediation of contaminated groundwater. Since then, his areas of research have expanded to include most aspects of in situ chemical reduction and oxidation (ISCR, ISCO), including some of the earliest work on abiotic reduction (ANA) of contaminants and the largest body of high-impact research on ZVI. Much of this work has targeted chlorinated solvents and explosives, but his work also applies to emerging and especially-recalcitrant contaminants like 1,2,3-trichloropropane (TCP) and PFAS. A cross-cutting theme in most of his work is the use of correlation analysis to develop predictive models for contaminant fate determining properties.