American chemical Society AMA: I am Andrew Torelli, a biochemist who’s developed a smart phone spectroscope that helps measure water quality collected in streams by citizen scientists. Ask me anything about citizen science!

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Hi Reddit!

I am Andrew Torelli and I’m an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Center for Photochemical Sciences at Bowling Green State University (http://ift.tt/1OnbSsA). I have a lot of experience working at the interface of chemistry, the environment, software, and citizen engagement. I teach various courses related to biochemistry, and lead a research lab focused on the relationship between the molecular structure and function of bacterial proteins.

Living near Toledo, OH, I was alarmed, as were many of my neighbors, by the devastating algal blooms in Lake Erie in recent years (http://ift.tt/1o7FA5n). I want to help figure out why these are happening so we can try to stop this harmful environmental occurrence. Given that many places can be sources of phosphorus the algae eat, it’s important to measure water quality from as many locations as possible.

So along with some colleagues (Joe Chao, Alexis Ostrowski and others), we’ve developed a spectroscope that ports onto a smart phone to easily enable citizen scientists to collect and measure scientifically useful data on water quality. We call our project Geograph http://ift.tt/1UQMLuB and we’re working with Rotary Clubs to measure water quality data around the Lake Erie basin in Ohio and Michigan.

Ask me anything about citizen science or what it’s like to develop instruments for non-expert citizen scientists.

Note: On June 7, 2016, I participated in a Congressional briefing on citizen science. You can find the video archive when it’s available via www.acs.org/scicon or http://ift.tt/1UQMDLu

I’ll be back at 11:00am EDT to answer your questions!

">American chemical Society AMA: I am Andrew Torelli, a biochemist who’s developed a smart phone spectroscope that helps measure water quality collected in streams by citizen scientists. Ask me anything about citizen science!