This month Babcock Laboratories, a leader in the environmental testing industry, attended the National Environmental Monitoring Conference (NEMC). Both our Senior Chemist, David Schiessel, and our Corporate Communications Director, Alexandra Chrystal, gave presentations at this year’s meeting, which took place August 7th - 11th in Washington, D.C.  

Mr. Schiessel contributed two oral presentations and one poster presentation on his innovative research and method development concerning the analysis of perfluorinated compounds (PFCs—also known as PFAS). Given the health risks PFCs pose to the public and environment, it is important that laboratories have the capability to detect these types of analytes even when they are not specifically looking for them. For this reason, Mr. Schiessel has focused his research and development efforts on non-targeted suspect screening strategies using low resolution LC-MS-MS, and presented his data and findings at the conference. You can read more about Mr. Schiessel’s research and method development efforts in an earlier article.

Ms. Chrystal gave an oral presentation on effectively communicating scientific information, the theme of this year’s conference. Her presentation identified common challenges associated with communicating highly technical and complicated scientific information to data users and the public. Ms. Chrystal also provided best practices for effectively communicating scientific information and improving scientific literacy.  

This was Mr. Schiessel’s second and Ms. Chrystal’s third year in a row giving presentations at NEMC, respectively. In addition to Mr. Schiessel and Ms. Chrystal, Babcock Labs’ Vice President and Laboratory Technical Director, Brad Meadows, was in attendance at the conference this year.     

NEMC is held annually as a part of the Environmental Measurement Symposium—a combined meeting of the NEMC and The NELAC Institute (TNI)’s Forum on Environmental Accreditation. The Symposium is co-sponsored by TNI under a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Each year hundreds of QA/QC managers, regulatory affairs managers, field sampling management organizations, researchers, and laboratory scientists, analysts, and managers attend this symposium, making it the largest conference in North America focused on environmental measurements. The staff who attend such conferences gain greater knowledge of the various aspects within each of the industries we serve and bring this knowledge back to Babcock Labs so that we can continue to better serve our clients.