I am an environmental scientist interested in tackling pollution and contamination problems that are caused by human activity. For my PhD I am investigating the extent of heavy metal contamination in urban soils across southern Ireland, and the extent to which contamination is controlled by the amount and type of organic matter present. Soil samples will be analysed using in-house portable XRF facilities plus synchrotron-XRF and -XANES. This research will represent the first systematic survey of Irish urban soils and will aid our understanding of organic matter heavy metal binding.

Publications

• Binner, H., Sullivan, T., Kamali, N., Hayes, M., Harding, M., 2019. “Assessment of the potential environmental impacts arising from mercury-free dental restorative materials.”  International Association for Dental Research (IADR) Annual Meeting, Cork.
• Binner, H., Kamali, N., Harding, M., Sullivan, T., 2019. “Assessment of the potential environmental impacts arising from mercury-free dental restorative materials.” ENVIRON 2019, Carlow.
• Binner, H., Kamali, N., Harding, M., Sullivan, T., 2018. “Assessment of the environmental and health impacts arising from mercury-free dental restorative materials.” Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) – Health Service Executive (HSE) “Knowledge and Data” Conference, Dublin.
• Binner H., 2018. Assessment of the utility of the ESA SST CCI product for environmental research using data from meteorological buoys in the North Atlantic (Version 1.0). Zenodo. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1450367.

Biography

• 2020 – present: PhD (Geology) student at University College Cork, Ireland. PhD thesis: “The impact of organic matter on heavy metal bioavailability in urban soils: experimental and field-based approaches”.
• 2018 – 2019: MSc (Res) student (Environmental Science) at University College Cork, Ireland. MSc (Res) thesis: “Assessment of the potential environmental impacts of mercury-free dental materials”.
• 2014 – 2018: BSc (Hons) Environmental Science at University College Cork, Ireland. BSc thesis: “Assessment of the utility of the ESA SST CCI product for environmental research using data from meteorological buoys in the North Atlantic”.