• Number 386  |
• April 15, 2013

NETL’s only microbiologist finds multidisciplinary interests in work and play

Hank Edenborn has a cartoon on his wall that shows a scientist finding a $20 bill under a petri dish. It says below—“Fact: Many of science’s most useful discoveries are found while looking for something entirely different.”

Whether it’s conducting research at DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory or hiking in Pennsylvania’s forests, Edenborn’s natural curiosity lies in honing in on what’s going on around him. Officially a research microbiologist at NETL, he more often wears the hat of a geomicrobiologist or microbial geochemist or biologist, depending on the project or the day.

Edenborn describes his interests as multidisciplinary, including science, nature, industrial history, and music. Growing up in the Philadelphia suburbs, he collected rocks and minerals as a boy, and he visited many old mine sites in the eastern Pennsylvania region. He headed for the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology to study geology and ultimately was lured to the field of environmental biology. “I actually became interested in microbiology at New Mexico Tech, where my professor was studying the use of bacteria to leach copper ores. I also admired the way he could open a petri dish with one hand, something to which I immediately aspired,” he explained.

Heading to Rutgers University for graduate work in marine microbiology, he just missed out participating on a project looking at the microbiology of salt evaporation ponds on the Caribbean island of Bonaire, also one of the best scuba diving areas in the world. Instead, his Ph.D. thesis option was study of the microbiology of New York City’s sewage sludge dump sites off the coast of New Jersey. “The short straw,” he said.

Opting for marine research, but in cleaner waters, he then accepted a research fellowship in the oceanography department at the Université du Québec à Rimouski in Canada, working with a research team studying trace element cycling in deep-water sediments of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Referring to his cartoon, Edenborn noted that the team happened to discover the nesting habitat of a rarely-seen sediment-dwelling fish in the process of these studies.

Claiming that he never complains about heavy snow after living in Canada, Edenborn next turned his attention to bioremediation of contamination in soil and groundwater in Oak Ridge, Tenn., where he worked as a geomicrobiologist for a small biotech firm. While he was there, he also pursued his interests in music, playing banjo and guitar in a local bluegrass band. Playing in the house band at the Rocky Fork Jamboree, a venue deep in the hills of Morgan County, was a great musical experience for someone interested in both the history and the playing of the music. “It could just as easily have been 1948 in the places where we played. We never made any money, but we sure got a lot of free beans and corn bread!” Edenborn later formed a company to record one of his favorite banjo players, Don Stover, and he produced several records for him and other bluegrass musicians over the years.

Migrating north, Edenborn joined the biotechnology group at the former U.S. Bureau of Mines in Pittsburgh, Pa., where he was involved in pioneering work on the treatment of coal and metal mine drainage using constructed wetland systems and other biological approaches. When the Bureau rolled over to the former Federal Energy Technology Center (FETC)—now NETL—he continued working on pollution in the soils and water in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. He described the work as multidisciplinary with a biology twist: “Geology, chemistry and biology are all inter-related, but the rates of biological processes are what usually limit the speed and efficiency of site recovery. The problem is that nature does things at one speed, and we humans are into instant gratification.”

What is unusual and “out-of-place” claims Edenborn’s attention when he’s hiking in the woods and ignites his passion to know more. He is interested in industrial archaeology, finding it exciting to come upon old industrial sites in the woods that have few associated clues to reveal their original purpose. Scientifically, such sites often reveal how nature reclaims soils contaminated by man-made activities, and the various processes responsible for their natural remediation.

Edenborn deepens his knowledge of history while following up on whatever he’s studying. An adjunct research assistant professor of biology in the Allegheny Institute of Natural History at the University of Pittsburgh in Bradford, Pa., he combined his fascination about the history of northwestern Pennsylvania’s early oil and lumber industries with research on oil and wood tar bioremediation, water quality and plant/bacterial interactions.

“One of my favorite places is a barren spot in the middle of the woods not far from the place where Edwin Drake drilled the first commercially successful oil well in the U.S. in 1859. It was the site of a factory where sulfuric acid, used in the refining of kerosene at the time, was recycled. Although the rest of the valley has recovered from the oil activities of the 1800s, this site remains unvegetated due to the impact of acid and heavy metals. It’s important to understand the processes used by such factories to understand the impacts of the pollutants. We were lucky enough to come across the diary of a worker in this factory, so now also know such details as the economics of chicken farming in 1915, and the hazards inherent in skinny-dipping in the river downstream of an acid factory,” he explained.

The region’s wood chemical industry, which was active in the early 1900s, is another forgotten industrial activity that left an historical impact. Trees and brush that remained after all the larger trees were cut down for lumber were heated in ovens and used to make wood alcohol and charcoal. Large quantities of wood tar remained from this process, and at least one EPA Superfund site was created when on warm summer days cars started sinking into parking lots built over tar deposits. Edenborn and other researchers at the University of Pittsburgh located a number of these sites and investigated the progress of their natural remediation and current impact on the local ecology.

Pennsylvania’s charcoal blast furnaces, often called “pyramids” locally, were used up until the Civil War to make cast iron and are fascinating industrial sites to come across in the woods because so much of their stone structure often remains, Edenborn said. He and his NETL colleagues used LiDAR, an optical remote sensing technology, to show that hundreds of the old hearth sites that produced charcoal to supply the iron furnaces could be easily detected using this technology. “The tie-in to NETL work is that we believe that we can use the same techniques to identify old oil and gas well sites in current Marcellus gas fields. Old oil wells are often there, but not on maps, and old wells can interfere with new gas development. Confirming the location of old wells will help make contemporary operations as environmentally safe as possible,” he said.

Edenborn has also developed a strong interest in unusually cold spots (talus slopes and caves) in Pennsylvania. On one hike in Huntingdon County, he noticed lichens new to him growing on a cold rocky slope. This led him to call in experts on the subject, who confirmed that the lichens were in fact boreal, indigenous to much more northerly climates, and they had never been found before in the state. In collaboration with West Virginia University (he’s an adjunct professor of geology there), Edenborn and his fellow researchers continuously monitored the temperature for over three years in another well-known cold site in central Pennsylvania, the Trough Creek ice mine. Because of his studies, he was invited by The Nature Conservancy to serve on a panel to peer-review its application to the National Park Service in 2010 to make Ice Mountain a National Natural Landmark. The Nature Conservancy purchased 159 acres on Ice Mountain in 1989, including the entire algific talus slope to protect its rare and fragile ecosystem. Last year, Ice Mountain received the designation as a natural landmark.

Edenborn is currently working on some ancillary but noteworthy activities. At the newly constructed Center for Sustainable Landscapes of the Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh, which is being touted as one of the greenest buildings in the world, he is involved in the analysis of its novel passive water system and is determining how the system can be tweaked to operate even more efficiently. Edenborn is also interested in whether coal-combustion products and other waste materials can be safely incorporated into growth substrates on NETL green roofs. Successfully managed green roofs on DOE buildings reduce the amount of rainfall runoff to streams and rivers, help insulate buildings and lower energy costs, and provide other aesthetic benefits.

And finally, what would a story such as this be without a little romance? Edenborn met his wife, Sherie, at the former Bureau of Mines. She is now a biology professor at Chatham University in Pittsburgh. The Edenborns have one daughter, also currently a student at Chatham. Asked if their daughter is pursuing a career path like her parents’, Edenborn laughed and replied, “She is fluent in Japanese and a good artist. She is doing her best to avoid anything to do with science! I know I would do the same thing in her shoes.”

Submitted by DOE's National Energy Technology Laboratory