A Young Scientist on a Journey of Discovery

Last year, I wrote to you about a young and gifted scientist, Maria Elena Grimmett, of Palm Beach Gardens, FL, who published her second sole-author paper in Journal of Environmental Quality. The paper, titled “Adsorption of Sulfamethazine from Environmentally Relevant Aqueous Matrices onto Hypercrosslinked Adsorbent MN250,” reports her findings on a remediation method that removes sulfamethazine, a widely used livestock antibiotic that contaminates groundwater. In this paper, Maria Elena describes how organic matter, pH, and ionic strength affect the equilibrium and kinetic chemistry of the interaction between sulfamethazine and the adsorbent. This is important because these are the key environmental variables that affect adsorption reactions involved in pollutant remediation. The membrane she used to remove sulfamethazine can be reused, applied at scale, and implemented using delivery systems already in place for treating drinking water. The remarkable part of this story is that Maria Elena is a 17-year-old high school student. Maria Elena first became interested in water contamination as a grade-school student. She started reading about the topic and eventually began conducting chemistry experiments in her family’s dining room. She corresponded with authors of the scientific papers she was reading and gained more understanding of the research topic. This curiosity, hard work, and perseverance paid off with her first scientific publication in JEQ in 2013, when she was only 14 years old. She continued on her journey of discovery by attending scientific meetings to eventually make 14 A Young Scientist on a Journey of Discovery