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EDUCATION
B.Sc. Biological Sciences, 1970 London University,
England
Ph.D. Marine Zoology, 1974 London University,
England
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE AND RESEARCH INTERESTS
Dr. Gary Denton is Professor of Environmental
Toxicology at WERI and has worked on environmental
issues for the past 30 years. As a Ph.D.
student in the early 1970s, he was among
the first group of scientists to look closely
at the behavior of PCBs in the environment
and studied their uptake and loss in commercial
shellfish from Southampton waters, in the
UK. In 1974, he was awarded a post-doctoral
Research Fellowship from James Cook University
of north Queensland, in Townsville, Australia,
to investigate the impact of a recently constructed
nickel refinery on a shallow bay receiving
effluent discharged from the facility. The
work yielded a number of important publications
in the realm of heavy metal research, particularly
in areas related to environmental monitoring,
toxicity testing, and accumulation and depuration
kinetics. The baseline monitoring program
and bioindicator surveys that emerged from
this work were later extended by Dr. Denton
to key offshore locations within the Great
Barrier Reef Province and remain as important
milestones in the water quality database
for the region. One of several offshoots
of this research focused on the utility of
giant clams as sentinels of heavy metal pollution
in coral reef waters, an approach that has
since been adopted by scientists elsewhere
in the Pacific.
Dr. Denton joined the WERI faculty in 1990.
His primary research interests center around
water quality with emphasis on contaminant
transport, fate and toxicity. Some of his recently
completed works deal with the aqueous chemistry
of local wetlands, toxic contaminants in harbor
sediments and biota, pesticide persistence
and mobility in local soils, the biological
impact of urban runoff on coastal communities,
and nutrient enrichment of nearshore waters.
He is currently examining the ecological impact
of landfill leachate streams on a receiving
watershed, evaluating the reliability of current
USEPA microbiological standards for monitoring
the recreational health of surface waters,
and determining the distribution and abundance
of PCBs and other persistent chlorinated compounds
in a critical swampland habitat impacted by
a power plant and other facilities of military
origin. Dr. Denton is a member of the Graduate
Faculty at UOG, and past two-term Chairman
of the Environmental Science Master’s
Degree Program. He teaches graduate courses
in environmental toxicology and chairs a number
of graduate thesis committees. He is a member
of the Society of Environmental Toxicology
and Chemistry and has published over 40 peer
reviewed professional journal articles, book
chapters, and technical reports.
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