Dr. Celia Chen is an aquatic ecologist whose research over the last 15 years has focused on the fate and effects of metal contaminants in aquatic food webs both in freshwater and estuarine ecosystems. She has studied the biovailability and bioaccumulation of mercury and other metals (arsenic, cadmium, lead, zinc) in benthic and pelagic invertebrates and trophic transfer to fish. She has conducted metal bioavailability studies in the laboratory using freshwater and estuarine crustaceans and fish, and has also investigated metal bioaccumulation and trophic transfer in field studies in lakes and estuaries in the Northeast US. Her research questions focus on the chemical and ecological factors that influence metal uptake, including salinity, natural organic matter, feeding strategy, and food web structure. Much of her earlier research focused on Hg related processes in lake food webs and more recently her research has moved to estuarine ecosystems particularly intertidal food webs. She has been interested in identifying the factors that influence system-to-system variability in Hg bioaccumulation and also to assess the relative importance of ecological processes in understanding mercury bioaccumulation in a variety of aquatic ecosystems. She and her colleagues are also developing Daphnia and killifish microarrays as biomarkers of metal exposure.