ABOVE: Siobhán Brady
DAVID SLIPHER, UC DAVIS COLLEGE OF BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Metal-heavy grasses were what grabbed Siobhán Brady’s attention. It was the mid-’90s, she was in her first year at the University of Toronto (U of T), and she was learning about grass varieties that can tolerate taking up normally toxic heavy metals. Having grown up in Canada visiting Lake Erie beaches, some of which had to be closed at times to remove metals originating in nearby steel factories from the sand, Brady “was pretty enamored by the fact that you could use a natural part of the environment to be able to fix what humans had done to destroy it,” she says. In this case, the potential solution was growing the grasses in contaminated soil, then harvesting them and disposing of the concentrated contaminants. “I was just totally smitten and decided that this is what I wanted to do for ...
