Contaminants of Emerging Concern in Drinking Water: An HTC-18 Interview with Leon Barron
At HTC-18 in Leuven, Executive Editor of LCGC International, Alasdair Matheson, spoke to Leon Barron from Imperial College London about his innovative research focusing on modern chromatographic techniques for analyzing contaminants of emerging concern in drinking water.
Dr. Leon Barron leads the Emerging Chemical Contaminants team within the Environmental Research Group at Imperial College London. His research focuses on the sources, risks, threats, and impacts of toxic chemical mixtures on environmental and public health. In particular, his analytical work focusses on rapid method development using liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC–MS) and gas chromatography–MS (GC–MS) for large-scale application to contaminants of emerging concern, including pharmaceuticals, illicit drugs, pesticides, persistent organic chemicals (including PFAS), among others, in air, water, soil and biota. He has particular expertise in water profiling, including large-scale identification and monitoring of wastewater for community health markers in near real time and identifying sources of chemical pollution in the environment. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), the Chartered Society of Forensic Sciences and the Higher Education Academy. Among several committee positions held, he was elected to the RSC Analytical Science Community Council in 2019 to promote the chemical sciences in environmental pollution and health fields.
In the below video interview, Leon discusses the following topics:
- You recently published a paper on enhanced selectivity for acidic contaminants in drinking water. What was the rationale behind this project?
- What types of analytes are you analyzing and what were the problems you encountered using previous techniques?
- What type of instrumental analysis did you do on the extracts?
- What were your main findings?
- What other projects have you been involved in related to drinking water?
- Can you summarize your research from an analytical and public health perspective?
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