#29 Quicksilver and the black kite with David McLagan

Today on the podcast we welcome Dr. David McLagan.

David is an Assistant Professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He specializes in environmental geochemistry with a focus on mercury dynamics, but his work is thoroughly interdisciplinary, drawing from the fields of atmospheric chemistry, dendrochronology, and human health. David is part of a team of researchers that recently received the Governor General’s Innovation Award for their work developing technology to monitor mercury levels in the atmosphere, which you’ll hear about in our conversation. David completed his PhD in Environmental Science here at the University of Toronto-Scarborough (UTSC), where he was co-supervised by Drs Carl Mitchell and Frank Wania. He held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Technical University of Braunschweig from 2018 to 2021, and then reconnected with us here at UTSC for a year as an Instructor and Director of the terrestrial and aquatics systems field of our master of environmental science program.

We spoke with David about the history of mercury as an environmental contaminant, his research in advancing technology to monitor mercury around the globe, the effect of wildfire on atmospheric mercury concentrations, and the importance of thinking critically about our relationship with fire, including its role in Indigenous land relations. We also talked about David’s passion for teaching, and the value of experimenting in the classroom. He’s truly a rising star in the field of environmental science and it was a pleasure to hear about his journey thus far.

David's website: https://fewalab.ca/