Las Positas College Hosts Dr. Maverick Zavarin Seminar Series

Press release from Las Positas College:

Oct. 12, 2020

Las Positas College (LPC) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) launch the 11th Annual Science and Engineering Seminar Series on Tuesday, October 13.
Dr. Maverick Zavarin, Director of the Glenn T. Seaborg Institute at LLNL, will lead Environmental Radiochemistry: Where Radiochemistry meets Environmental Science. Zavarin has spent much of his career at LLNL studying actinide environmental chemistry.

Throughout the seminar, Zavarin will discuss key aspects of environmental radiochemistry, environmental remediation, predictive computer modeling, and discuss how environmental radiochemistry plays an important role in nuclear forensics and other chemistry fields. Over the past 75 years, the nuclear age has led to dispersal of radioactivity worldwide, leading to the consideration of ending the Holocene epoch in geologic time and designating a new 'Anthropocene' epoch that coincides with the start of the atomic age. Understanding the risks of radioactivity to human health and the environment requires a detailed understanding of its behavior in aquatic systems, reactions at mineral/water interfaces, and interaction with microbes, over time scales of thousands of years. Zavarin will be joined for the question/answer session by Enrica Balboni, staff scientist, environmental radiochemistry and nuclear forensics Gauthier Deblonde, staff scientist, actinide chemistry.

Zavarin's research has focused on experimental and modeling efforts to understand and simulate the transport behavior of radionuclides in the environment, with a particular focus on actinides. Recently, he spent a sabbatical at the Helmholtz Zentrum Dresden Rossendorf (Germany) where he initiated a long-term collaboration combining the application of data science with radionuclide reactive transport modeling.

As a director at LLNL, Zavarin manages an active research group of postdocs and graduate students, hosting an annual student summer internship program and promotes collaborative research between LLNL and the academic community in radiochemistry and nuclear forensics. On occasion, he teaches introductory chemistry at Las Positas Community College.

The event, which is free and open to the public, begins at 6 p.m., virtually via Zoom. To register, visit: cccconfer.zoom.us/meeting/register.

This press release was produced by Las Positas College. The views expressed here are the author's own.