11 Atekwana says she was honored to receive a Regents professorship, and she lauds OSU for supporting the department where she and her husband, Eliot Atekwana, have been since 2006. While OSU is often concerned with energy issues, Estella Atekwana focuses on biogeophysics. Her first discoveries, that microbes can affect geophysical properties, took place when she was an assistant professor at Western Michigan University. In 1996, she was part of a team that visited a contaminated U.S. Air Force base, Wurtsmith, in Oscoda, Mich., after the site made the federal government’s Superfund list for cleanup. Team members were studying groundwater contaminated with oil and found the water was better at conducting electricity than it should be. They were able to link those changes in its properties to organisms that were breaking down the oil and producing organic acids and carbon dioxide as byproducts. “These acids enhance the weathering and dissolution of rocks, releasing ions that go into solution and make the contaminated environment more conductive,” she says. “We used this information to explain our geophysics results suggesting that microorganisms can significantly impact the physical properties of their environment, and biogeophysics was born.” Today, her work takes her all over the world, most recently from the shores of a little island in Louisiana to an isolated valley in Botswana where two continental plates are in the early stages of pulling apart. She always takes her students on such trips and believes firmly in the role she plays in their development as much as she believes in the importance of her research. Most recently, she has been the lead principal investigator on a $4.6 million multi-institution grant from the National Science Foundation to study the Okavango Rift system in Botswana, which has trapped the Okavango River, forming the largest wetland complex in the world. Normally, massive volcanoes such as Kilamanjaro are a byproduct of developing rifts and dot the East African Rift Valley next door. But that’s not taking place in the Okavango Rift Valley, Atekwana notes, so she’s trying to figure out why. She and her students travel to the region on the edge of the Kalahari Desert where they take core samples and examine magnetic and gravity field data to find magma circulation beneath the ground. They live in tents, often working in areas frequented by lions, zebras, giraffes, hippos and other large wild animals. She spent last summer taking gravity measurements across the rift system to determine how the earth’s gravity fields are changed by the rifting, indicating changes in the thickness of the crust and other geologic features that will give them clues on how the rift works and how it began and developed. In Louisiana, Atekwana is measuring naturally occurring Gulf of Mexico bacteria’s ability to break down oil in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010. The spill was the world’s largest and sparked a cleanup that continued for months as well as ongoing research into its effectiveness. That’s where Atekwana’s work comes in. She and her team placed electrical sensors next to an island near the spill site in the fall after the spill. Most of her readings showed much of the hydrocarbons left by the spill were gone, and shifts in the bacteria community had occurred. Those tilted the tables toward a dominant organism, which she suspects is breaking down the chemicals. More work remains to be done, however. “The truth is there are lots of spills in the gulf,” she says. “The island where our instruments are has been hit by multiple spills over the years.” Atekwana attended Howard University for her bachelor’s and master’s degrees. She has a doctoral degree from Nova Scotia’s Dalhousie University. She has taught at Western Michigan and the Missouri University of Science and Technology. She frequently pairs in her research with her husband, Eliot Atekwana, a geochemist at OSU and expert in areas including how environments dispose of contaminants and environmental change in ancient times. Estella Atekwana
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