The National Science Foundation has awarded a team of Penn State researchers $6.7 million to establish a new center for the study of environmental kinetics.

The grant will establish the Penn State Center for Environmental Kinetics Analysis (CEKA) to be administered by the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, in its role as one of the Penn State Institutes of the Environment.

The Center for Environmental Kinetics Analysis will bring together chemists, geochemists, biochemists, soil scientists and engineers to measure and synthesize kinetic data for environmental systems and to promote modeling of the temporal evolution of such systems.

The group will jointly try to answer the question, "How fast do pollutants and natural salts react with minerals in soils and aquifers?" The center will emphasize the problem of how to answer this question using laboratory or computer experiments and then how to scale the answer to natural systems. CEKA hypothesizes that training students to think about environmental problems at several scales of analysis will promote better approaches for analysis of environmental systems.

10/1/2004