Priya joined the Department of Geological Sciences at California State University, Northridge in January 2018. She studies the transport and fate of contaminants in aquatic environments, with a focus on the element mercury. After completing her MS in Earth Sciences from UC Santa Cruz, she worked on a variety of environmental remediation projects at the San Francisco Bay Water Quality Control Board. She returned to UC Santa Cruz for her PhD in Earth Sciences, where she studied the influence of groundwater – seawater interaction on mercury toxicity and transport at the coastal margin. At CSUN, Dr. Ganguli is part of the new Water Science Program where she continues to study chemical cycling at the land-sea margin, as well as questions regarding wildfire impacts on contaminant mobilization and the long-term effects of environmental remediation projects, such as the New Idria Mine Superfund Site. Learn more about her work at http://www.priyaganguli.com/home, and contact her at priya.ganguli@csun.edu.

Kuria received a BSc. in chemistry from Kenyatta University, Kenya and a Masters and Ph.D in analytical Chemistry from University of Botswana and Lund University, respectively. His research is on the biogeochemical cycling of inorganic elements, both as nutrients and pollutants in coastal and open ocean waters. He started the research as a Dreyfus postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). He then moved to Stockholm University, where he continued that line of research with a focus on the Baltic Sea and the polar regions. At the Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA) where he works now, his focus has been the North Sea and the Arctic. NIVA is Norway’s leading institute for fundamental and applied research in marine and fresh waters. He is the GEOTRACES program country representative for Norway. GEOTRACES is an international study of the marine biogeochemical cycles of trace elements and their isotopes. In the near future, watch out for Kuria's nomination as an Ig Nobel winner!!! Contact him at Kuria.Ndungu@niva.no.

Attached below are videos concerning some of his more recent work regarding undersea wrecks and the contamination associated with these sites:

Time watch: the hunt for U-864 (BBC)

Stabilizing the wreck of the U-864 submarine in Norway (Norwegian Coastal Administration)

Construction of the counter filling (Norwegian Coastal Administration)