Shira Joudan hired by the University of Alberta

Congratulations to Dr. Shira Joudan, who was hired at the University of Alberta as an assistant professor of environmental/analytical chemistry, with a start date of January 2023. In 2020, she earned her PhD in environmental chemistry from the University of Toronto’s Department of Chemistry under the supervision of Dr. Scott Mabury. Her doctoral research used laboratory experiments to elucidate environmental transformations of legacy and replacement per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) using four different experimental systems: atmospheric oxidation, microbial degradation, in vivo and in vitro mammalian metabolism. Prior to that, she obtained her BSc in chemistry from Carleton University in 2013 and then spent 16 months as a research assistant at the University of Winnipeg, where she performed field measurements of pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and personal care products. Now Shira is a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Cora Young’s research group at York University, where she is applying novel online ion chromatography-mass spectrometry methods to measure organic acids in the atmosphere, including halogenated acids. 

Overall, Shira’s research interests focus on how environmental reactions alter the environmental fate of organic contaminants, and how that ultimately impacts what potentially toxic chemicals humans and ecosystems are exposed to. Her research group will use cutting edge analytical methods including mass spectrometry to understand persistence, metabolism, and transport of contaminants, including PFAS, in our outdoor and indoor environments. Her research group will couple laboratory experiments with environmental measurements, each driving new hypotheses that can be corroborated by observations in the other.