Biography

Stuart Simpson is a Senior Principal Research Scientist in CSIRO Environment, and the Healthy Communities & Ecosystems group leader within the Industry Environments (IE) program.

This group develops threat surveillance and risk forecasting systems to protect Australian communities from acute and chronic shocks, reduce harmful wastes derived from consumption and develop sovereign sustainability options in green resource recovery and for Australia’s problematic wastes.
Teams include:
(i) EcoSurveillance Systems, the develops systems to detect and quantify risks of adverse effects of contaminants and pathogens to communities and ecosystems;
(ii) Green Resource Recovery, that develops pathways to recover metal resources and reduce environment footprint from resource extraction and consumption; and
(iii) Waste Beneficiation & Storage, the develops environmentally safe approaches for storage and repurposing of waste streams to minimise pollution and increase the beneficial reuse and circularity of resources.

Stuart's fields of expertise include (specific research areas/capabilities)
• Water and sediment quality assessment, focusing on the quantification of the form (speciation), behaviour (bioavailability), ecotoxicological effects of chemical contaminants, and the development of guidelines and frameworks for assessing impacts.
• Forms (speciation) and processes controlling fate of contaminants in the environment.
• Bioavailability and effects of contaminants in sediments.
• Environmental analytical chemistry.
• Development and application of sediment ecotoxicology methods.
• Development and application of biosurveillance methods for contaminants and pathogens.

Fields of Special Competence:
Major research interest is sediment quality assessment, focussing on the quantification of the form (environmental chemistry, speciation), behaviour (reactivity, fate and processes controlling speciation, bioavailability), ecotoxicological effects (lethal, sub-lethal, to chronic effects and bioaccumulation) and the development of guidelines for regulating contaminants in sediments.

Current activities
• Development of advanced water and sediment quality assessment tools and frameworks
• Application and validation of sediment quality guideline values
• Preparation of guidance documents for undertaking water and sediment quality assessment
• Development of new sub-lethal (chronic) whole-sediment ecotoxicology test methods
• Establishing cause-effect relationships between contaminants on benthic organisms
• Assessment of impacts of industrial operations on aquatic systems
• Developing new tools for assessing speciation and bioavailability contaminants in waters and sediments
• Evaluating the fate, forms and potential impacts of metals from acidic effluent discharges
• Development of techniques for sampling and ultratrace analysis of metal contaminants in aquatic environments
• Speciation and mechanistic modelling of processes relating to metal speciation and bioavailability.
• Contaminated site assessment in marine and freshwater environments
• Evaluation of acceptability of sediment dredging and dredged sediment disposal.
• Wastewater surveillance for human and animal health protection (SARS-CoV-2, animal pathogens, ARGs).

For more updates:
https://people-my.csiro.au/s/s/stuart-simpson
• Wastewater surveillance for human and animal health protection (SARS-CoV-2, animal pathogens, ARGs).