Biography and MS Research Topic: Teresa Baraza Piazuelo is a graduate student at Saint Louis University (SLU), MO. She is interested in understanding how anthropogenic activities impact our environment, and her work has been mainly conducted in karst landscapes. Her M.S. thesis focused on the role of vadose zone soils in the transport and retention of winter deicing salts before they reach shallow groundwater. She found that soils played a very important role in the delivery of sodium and chloride loads to the karst aquifer by retaining salt ions through two different mechanisms: slow porewater movement, and ion exchange reactions. She has presented her work in many national (GSA 2018 and 2019) and international conferences (Goldschmidt 2019), as well as in many local meetings and university symposiums. She is currently working on her first manuscript to share her results.
Current Work: Teresa decided to continue her education at SLU as a PhD student. As part of her PhD she will complement her M.S. work with a new study focused on the release and transport of toxic trace metals after deicing salt applications. Another of her PhD projects aims to describe the transport of microplastics through a karstic cave system.