GA EWRI November Joint meeting with GAWP Groundwater Committee (Hybrid)

Novemeber EWRI Joint meeting with GAWP Groundwater Committee (Hybrid)

Title: Predictions of groundwater PFAS occurrence at drinking water supply depths in the United States.

Speaker: Andrea Tokranov, USGS

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), known colloquially as “forever chemicals”, have been associated with adverse human health effects and have contaminated drinking water supplies across the United States owing to their long-term and widespread use. People in the United States may unknowingly be drinking water that contains PFAS because of a lack of systematic analysis, particularly in domestic water supplies. We present an extreme gradient boosting model for predicting the occurrence of PFAS in groundwater at the depths of drinking water supply for the conterminous United States. Our model results indicate that 71 to 95 million people in the conterminous United States potentially rely on groundwater with detectable concentrations of PFAS for their drinking-water supplies prior to any treatment.

Andrea Tokranov is a Research Hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), where her work focuses on environmental exposure, fate, and transport of contaminants of emerging concern. She manages a research laboratory at the USGS Eastern Ecological Science Center, where high resolution mass spectrometry is used for targeted and non-targeted analysis of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals”) in environmental samples. She also co-leads the PFAS Core Technology Team within the Environmental Health Program and serves on the federal interagency PFAS Strategy Team under the National Science and Technology Council. Andrea earned her Bachelor of Science degree from Brown University in 2012 and her PhD from the Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in 2019.

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