Tristan Smythe came to Carleton to pursue his doctorate in Chemistry, specializing in chemical and environmental toxicology. He completed his thesis work out of Environment and Climate Change Canada’s National Wildlife Research Centre (NWRC) located on campus, where he studied the behaviours of chemical contaminants in herring gulls from the Laurentian Great Lakes area. Chemicals like flame retardants accumulate in animals and may be transferred to their offspring. Because herring gulls are an important part of Great Lakes environmental monitoring, there is a need to understand where the chemicals end up in their bodies and how much of it is transferred each generation.
Tristan Smythe
Tristan’s thesis work utilized analytical techniques such as gas chromatography coupled mass spectrometry (GC-MS) to quantify over 40 flame retardants in various herring gull tissues (e.g., fat, muscle, blood) and their eggs. Interruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic also saw Tristan pivoting from plans to conduct in vitro microsomal stability assays – used to measure if and how fast chemicals are metabolized by a certain species – to utilizing computational methods of molecular mechanics to model and predict protein-flame retardant interactions in silico. As part of his thesis, Tristan also published a comprehensive and systematic review on the metabolic transformation of these flame retardant chemicals in animals available in Environment International.
Tristan (pictured left) with partner Sophia visiting Mount Assiniboine Provincial Park in B.C.
Tristan was honoured to have been nominated for a University Medal, and both surprised and extremely grateful to have been selected as the recipient of the University Medal for Outstanding Graduate Work – Doctoral. Tristan will be staying on at the NWRC on a post-doc working as a research scientist.