PAOC Spotlights

Estrogens are a family of hormones that are essential for growth and development, and, notably, for determining whether you are a female or a male. Exposure to even small amounts of “extra” estrogen can have profoundly negative health effects, giving rise to male fish with female sex organs, for example. With newfound abilities to detect extremely low levels of estrogens, including chemical forms that previously have escaped notice, David Griffith has been investigating how these toxic compounds enter the ocean and what happens to them there. David's advisors are Philip Gschwend at MIT and Timothy Eglinton at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Read more in David's recent Oceanus article.