Amalia Handler

Amalia Handler is a freshwater scientist whose research focuses on understanding and predicting water quality in rivers, streams, and lakes. Her current research focuses on harmful algal blooms in lakes across the United States. She develops national-scale spatial models that integrate watershed data, field surveys, and satellite remote sensing to identify which lakes are at elevated risk for toxic cyanobacteria blooms. She earned her Ph.D. from Arizona State University under the mentorship of Dr. Nancy Grimm, where she studied nitrogen cycling in dryland and urban aquatic systems. She went on to build a national HABs research program in EPA’s Office of Research and Development, drawing from multiple national datasets to answer questions about which lakes are more at-risk for blooms. She currently works as a Limnologist at FB Environmental. She lives in the Seacoast Region of New Hampshire, surrounded by the lakes and watersheds that motivate her work.

Harmful algal blooms caused by cyanobacteria are a growing threat to lakes across the United States, with serious implications for drinking water safety, recreational water use, and public health. Yet water managers lack the tools to know which of the hundreds of thousands of lakes in the country are most at risk for blooms and particularly toxic blooms. Through her EPN fellowship, Amalia is completing a national-scale analysis that uses spatial statistical models to predict cyanobacteria abundance and microcystin risk for approximately 125,000 lakes across the contiguous US. This work will be released as a publication and an open-source R package to ensure it is immediately usable by the scientific community and water resource managers. In the second phase of her fellowship, she will extend this framework into environmental justice, asking at national scale whether harmful algal bloom exposure risk falls disproportionately on communities least equipped to respond. Amalia is thrilled to be developing this work with support from EPN