My research interests lie in the areas of contaminant fate, transport, and remediation. I am particularly interested in aggressive remediation technologies for contaminated soils and emerging contaminants in the environment such as fire retardants and other micropollutants.

Professional Activities

Bioaccessibility of potentially toxic element associated with plastic resin pellets collected from the River Forth, Scotland, UK: Contributor; 2018
Training day on Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control for delegates from the Hebei Provincial Government: Speaker; 5/12/2017
Fire Technology (Journal): Peer reviewer; 1/7/2011
Environmental Science and Technology (Journal): Peer reviewer; 1/7/2011
Institute of Physics Combustion Physics Group (Sept 2010): Invited speaker; 9/2010
ConSoil 2008: Keynote/plenary speaker; 9/2008

More professional activities

Projects

Pathways for Equal access to the Energy Research Sector: Beattie, Stewart (Principal Investigator) Switzer, Christine (Principal Investigator) Kremer, Yannick (Principal Investigator) Murray, Michael (Principal Investigator); Ensuring equality and diversity in higher education begins with assembling a diverse learning community. Graduate Apprenticeships were set up to create new pathways into engineering for people from different backgrounds. While the Graduate Apprenticeship in Civil Engineering (GA-CE) diversified the number of stakeholders involved in recruitment and our GA employers are also committed to providing learning opportunities for a wide spectrum of society, there is an apparent lack of diversity in our GA-CE programme, which reflects a wider sector issue in GA programmes. This project seeks to identify the key factors affecting recruitment to the GA and develop recommendations to increase diversity in recruitment of future GA cohorts. The student intern, will conduct interviews and focus groups with employers to characterise the recruitment experience from all angles and inform development of initiatives to improve diversity in future GA applicant pools.

£11,016.61 (100% fEC) IGNITE Network (Equality, Diversity & Inclusion (EDI)+ FA2 project,; 10-Jan-2023 - 10-Jan-2023
Development of Novel Treatments for Carbon-based radioactive wastes: Renshaw, Joanna (Principal Investigator) Lunn, Rebecca (Co-investigator) Switzer, Christine (Co-investigator); "The nuclear energy and weapons programmes of the past 70 years have created a legacy of waste and contamination around the world. Amongst the very diverse and complicated wastes arising from these programmes are a range of orphan wastes. These are wastes which are not suitable for treatment in existing processing plants and for which there is no currently accepted treatment option.

This project will determine the feasibility of a wholly new approach to treatment of orphan radioactive wastes. The overarching longer-term research vision is for a three-stage waste treatment process. First, smouldering the waste (in the same way that coal smoulders in a fire) to burn the carbon and produce a small volume of stable radioactive ash that can be encapsulated (generally in cement) and placed into a container (comprised of steel or concrete) for future geological disposal. Second, capturing safely the radioactive emissions that are released by the smouldering process. These are in the form of microscopic particles of radionuclides and carbon dioxide gas that contains the radioactive element, Carbon 14. This capture will make use of similar technologies to those being explored to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to tackle climate change. Bacteria will be used to stimulate the production of carbonate and/or phosphate minerals, removing the radioactivity from the gases and capturing them into a stable mineral (i.e. into a rock) . Finally, this process of capturing the radioactivity into a mineral will be performed as part of the encapsulation process either for the radioactive ash (prior to placing it in a container) or for other radioactive wastes, so as to reduce the final volume of radioactive material that requires disposal.

In order for any treatment process of orphan wastes to be accepted by the UK regulatory authorities, it is critical that no radioactive gases are emitted. Hence, this research project will focus on demonstrating the feasibility of capturing (1) 14C as a stable carbonate and (2) other particulate radioactive emissions into stable phosphate minerals. The project will focus on demonstrating feasibility for a single wasteform, graphite, which is the largest volume orphan waste. If feasibility can be demonstrated, other research projects will follow to explore the smouldering process and the use of the carbonate and phosphate minerals for encapsulation of the radioactive ashes, created by the smouldering process."; 01-Jan-2017 - 31-Jan-2019
Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP - University of Strathclyde) | Swift, Paul: El Mountassir, Grainne (Principal Investigator) Switzer, Christine (Co-investigator) Swift, Paul (Research Co-investigator); 01-Jan-2016 - 01-Jan-2019
TERRE: Training Engineers and Researchers to Rethink geotechnical Engineering for a low carbon future (H2020 ETN): Tarantino, Alessandro (Principal Investigator) El Mountassir, Grainne (Co-investigator) Ferguson, Neil (Co-investigator) Knapp, Charles (Co-investigator) Lunn, Rebecca (Co-investigator) Switzer, Christine (Co-investigator); 01-Jan-2015 - 31-Jan-2019
ENTICE - ENhancing Transitions In Civil Engineering (HEA Student Transitions): Ferguson, Neil (Principal Investigator) Bertram, Doug (Co-investigator) Kenny, Michael (Co-investigator) Murray, Michael (Co-investigator) Switzer, Christine (Co-investigator); 11-Jan-2015 - 30-Jan-2015
KTP - Scottish Canals: Lord, Richard (Principal Investigator) Knapp, Charles (Co-investigator) Switzer, Christine (Co-investigator); 22-Jan-2013 - 21-Jan-2015