Environmental Engineering Postdoc Yun (Rosa) Yu explains her experiment at CU Boulder. Rosa works with Dr. Fernando Rosario-Ortiz on a NSF research project "Characterizing Pyrogenic Soil Organic Matter as a Source of Nitrogenous Desinfection Byproducts" looking at the transformation and mobilization of soil organic matter by forest fires and the role of pyrogenic organic matter as emerging precursors for drinking water disinfection byproducts. In this experiment, she’s using polymeric adsorbents to extract dissolved organic matter from a stream water sample collected from a burnt catchment in California. From the extracted organic matter, she’s trying to identify the thermal degradation products from soils and plants that were derived due to burning.