Wes Slaughter

Wes Slaughter is currently a PhD candidate working with Sujay Kaushal in the biogeochemistry laboratory at the University of Maryland, College Park, Department of Geological, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences. Slaughter works on water chemistry projects centered on the Potomac River, sampling from Appalachia to the Chesapeake. He has been working with the Chesapeake Bay Program, Potomac and Anacostia Riverkeepers, and many other collaborators in the process. 

Slaughter is excited to continue this work as a Maryland Sea Grant Graduate Research Fellow, leveraging previous and ongoing extensive synoptic sampling of the Potomac watershed with community science organizations, as well as data from intensive surveys of the Potomac Interceptor sewage spill to better understand pollutant sources and transformations along rivers and streams.

Slaughter was born and raised in the Chesapeake Bay watershed but began his career in aquatic science in California, working for a river food web ecology lab while completing a degree in molecular biology at University of California, Berkeley. In the years between his undergraduate studies and starting graduate school in 2023, he studied salmon with California Sea Grant, worked for a rural California water quality nonprofit, joined the EPA Office of Research and Development in North Carolina to work on a nanomaterial chemistry database, and worked as a data scientists for a biogeochemistry lab at Duke University.