Office of Student Research and Creative Activity

Area of Study: Environmental Analytical Chemistry

Research Interests: Environmental Chemistry, Persistent Organic Pollutants, Water, Sediment, Emerging Contaminants.

Full Bio

Area of Study: Mono- and multi-layer coatings, anti-rhinovirals, computational chemistry, development of computer tools for lab science and education.

Research Interests: Viral inhibitors, Quantum chemical computations, Computer assisted symbolic mathematics, Visualization of multidimensional objects, Self-assembled monolayers.

Area of Study: Organic Chemistry

Research Interests: Organic chemical synthesis. Recent projects include: Synthesizing non-natural alpha-amino acids, including 2-methylcysteine, using an enzyme to set the molecule’s stereochemistry; Chemically modifying waste polystyrene to upcycle it into higher value materials; Controlled synthesis of polyethylene terephthalate oligomers with specific numbers of repeating units for use in plastic biodegradation research; and Development of a greener Friedel-Crafts acylation experiment for undergraduate organic chemistry labs.

Area of Study: Environmental Microbiology, Engineering, and Sustainable Technology

Research Interests: Industrial Treatment Technologies, Water and Wastewater Issues, Biological Treatment of Air Emissions, Construction Issues and Indoor Air Quality, Environmental Public Health, Microbial Indicators of Water Quality, Microbial Pathogens in Recreational/Drinking Waters

Area of Study: Parasitology

Research Interests: The Michalski lab is primarily interested in lymphatic filariasis, a tropical disease caused by mosquito-borne nematodes.  They study the interaction of the microfilaria stage of filarial nematodes with their arthropod vector, filarial transcriptomics, and also naturally occurring filarial parasites of Wisconsin wildlife.  Interests include Molecular determinants of microfilarial infectivity, Filarial transcriptomics, and Filarial parasites of wildlife.

Area of Research: Applied and Environmental Microbiology

Research Interests: Bacterial Degradation of Organic Pollutants, Food Safety, Emerging Pollutants, Water Quality

Area of Research: Freshwater Science

Research Interests: Dr. Stelzer’s research interests center on the biogeochemistry and food web dynamics of streams and lakes. His research projects, which typically involve multiple collaborators and students, have included short and long-term studies of how nitrogen is processed in streams, studies of reciprocal controls between nutrients and species in the context of ecological stoichiometry, and large-scale experiments to address the factors that regulate stream food webs. Dr. Stelzer’s current research interests are focused on characterizing microplastics in freshwater food webs and predicting Harmful Algal Blooms in lakes.

Please contact Dr. Stelzer directly at stelzer@uwosh.edu if you are interested in working in Dr. Stelzer’s lab!