“That was novel,” she recalls with pride. “Now, we're working on the next questions: Which enzymes, specifically, are causing the change? And can it also occur in humans?” To answer these, Stapleton, who joined the Nicholas School faculty in September 2005, is conducting studies on human cell fractions as well as fish.
Preliminary results are promising. “It may be thyroid hormone enzymes,” she says. “If so, that has implications for endocrine activity and other important functions. But there's still a lot of work to do before we know for sure.”
Stapleton's natural curiosity, coupled with a lifelong fascination with aquatic animals, has taken her far from her childhood home in Candor, N.Y., a rural, landlocked community of about 5,000 in the bucolic Finger Lakes region.
“I was one of those kids who loved animals, especially sharks. I wanted to be the classic marine biologist,” she remembers. As an undergraduate at Southampton College, however, her classes involved research cruises and water-quality sampling in bays and estuaries, and she became increasingly aware of the impact pollution was having on the organisms that lived there.
Realizing where her true interest lay, she switched her major to chemistry, and, after graduation, enrolled in the graduate program in environmental chemistry at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science's Chesapeake Biological Laboratory.
It was there, while studying the accumulation of PCBs— polychlorinated biphenyls—in the Great Lakes' food web that Stapleton took the plunge into the murky world of PBDEs.
marketing@alchempro.com
