Matthew Reid, Cornell Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Matthew Reid joined the Cornell CEE faculty in July, 2016. He received his Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Princeton University in 2014 and a B.A. in Chemistry from the University of Chicago in 2004. From 2004 - 2006 he taught high school chemistry with the U.S. Peace Corps in Karatu, Tanzania. Upon returning to the United States, he began working in the environmental sciences as a laboratory technician in chemical oceanography at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Since 2014, he has worked as a postdoctoral scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland, on microbially driven arsenic cycling in rice paddy soils.

Research Interests

Reid is interested in the use of engineered and managed ecosystems as sustainable tools for water quality protection. His research is focused on the coupled biological, chemical, and physical processes that govern contaminant fate in soils, and on how these natural processes can be harnessed to preserve water quality and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from nutrient cycling. He addresses these problems primarily through well-controlled experiments in model systems and a combination of analytical approaches from environmental chemistry, microbiology, and modeling. Current projects include: 1) Microbial cycling of arsenic in rice paddy soils and implications for arsenic uptake into rice plants, 2) Nutrient dynamics and greenhouse gas emissions in on-site, soil-based wastewater treatment systems, and 3) Characterizing coupled biological and physical-chemical controls on nitrous oxide emissions from engineered wetland soils.

Professor Reid is interested in the use of engineered and managed ecosystems as sustainable tools for water quality protection. His research is focused on the coupled biological, chemical, and physical processes that govern contaminant fate in soils, and on how these natural processes can be harnessed to preserve water quality and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from nutrient cycling. 

There will be a reception with food and refreshments at 4:30 pm, following the seminar in Snee 2146 for faculty, staff, and students to meet Dr. Reid.

Title: Controls on Arsenic Speciation and Bioavailability in Rice Paddy Soils 

Growing concern about arsenic contamination of rice has directed new attention to the biogeochemical processes controlling arsenic speciation and bioavailability in flooded rice paddy soils.  The first part of this talk describes complementary field and laboratory experiments exploring the effects of wetting-drying cycles on coupled manganese, iron, and arsenic mobilization into pore waters.  A specific objective of these experiments was to evaluate the role of manganese oxides as redox buffers controlling the onset of iron-reducing conditions that drive arsenic mobilization.  The second part of the talk will describe new insights into interactions between arsenic and wetland dissolved organic matter (DOM).  DOM-bound arsenic has traditionally been thought to represent a negligible fraction of the dissolved arsenic pool, but new findings with anoxically-extracted DOM and arsenic/DOM ratios representative of wetland pore waters suggest a significant contribution of DOM-bound arsenic to aqueous arsenic speciation and an important role for organic sulfur functional groups as arsenic binding sites.  The implications of arsenic-DOM binding for biological uptake of arsenic in DOM-rich environments will be evaluated using an arsenic biosensor assay.