June 5, 2015 | Erin Bluvas, bluvase@sc.edu
Mohammed Baalousha and Jamie Lead,* from the Center for Environmental Nanoscience & Risk (CENR) in the Arnold School’s Department of Environmental Health Sciences, have developed a research book: Characterization of Nanomaterials in Complex Environmental and Biological Media. Published by Elsevier, the book covers the novel properties of nanomaterials and their applications to consumer products and industrial processes.
“The characterization of nanomaterials is highly interdisciplinary and highly challenging but necessary to fully understand their environmental behavior,” Baalousha says. As editors, Baalousha and Lead decided to publish this book in order to fill the growing gap of characterizing nanomaterials, bringing together chemistry, physics, biology and other relevant disciplines. “As a key component of the nontechnology industry, nanomaterials have novel properties making them of great interest for many consumer products and industrial processes,” says Baalousha. “But they also present concerns for environmental and human health.”
The editors believe that the characterization of nanomaterial properties and their interactions with different components of environmental and biological media are essential in improving the scientific understanding of their environmental transformations, behavior, fate and effects. “The content of this book underpins environmental risk assessment of nanomaterials, but equally it reinforces our ability to sustainably develop nanotechnology,” Baalousha says.
The primary audiences of this book include academics, professionals, researchers and anyone working in fields where nanomaterial characterization is essential to underpin their research and development. It primarily serves as a research book but can also be used as a textbook for graduate studies in environmental science. The editors offer a practical, multidisciplinary approach that provides highly skilled scientists, engineers and technicians with the tools they need to understand and interpret complicated sets of data obtained through sophisticated analytical techniques.
Baalousha and Lead’s book is now available on Amazon. For questions or comments, you can contact Baalousha at mbaalous@sc.edu.
*Lead has also recently published two additional books as editor: Aquatic Organic Matter Fluorescence published by Cambridge University Press and Nanoscience in the Environment published by Elsevier. The books cover different aspects of the CENR interests, with the first focused on natural organic macromolecules and the second focused on manufactured nanomaterials and their environmental consequences.