Dr. GARY R.W. DENTON, Ph.D.
gdenton@uog.edu


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.