Water Scholar Awardee Spring 2023: Genevieve Guerry

For Genevieve Guerry, the coast is where she feels at home. During her childhood, she moved to many different places, including Great Britain, as her family has military origins.

Today, she lives in Norfolk, Virginia, and visits the Outer Banks in North Carolina as often as possible.

Guerry is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in the Integrated Coastal Sciences Program at East Carolina University and likes to spend her research time at the Coastal Studies Institute. Her Water Scholar project is part of her dissertation and focuses on the following topic: “Preliminary Perceptions of Chemical Contamination in Cape Fear Region.”

The idea for the project, Guerry said, comes from her time as a master’s student at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

“I was living in Wilmington, NC when the news broke that there was this chemical called GenX in the water and it was part of these chemicals also known as forever chemicals,” Guerry said. “That was back in 2017. So, I did a little bit of work on it during my master’s studies, but then I went to Clemson University to teach Marina Science. I had a break from school until I got into ECU, which was the reason why I went back to my original research.”

One of her advisors at ECU, she said, told her to talk to Dr. Jamie DeWitt because she knew Guerry was interested in per- and polyfluorinated substances (PFAS).

During her meeting with DeWitt, she found out there was an existing project of researching social media to gather how people were sharing information about contamination, Guerry said.

“That research got a small grant to conduct a survey, which involved both undergraduate and graduate students,” Guerry said. “All of this took place in Washington, NC and the goal was to declare it as a non-contained community. But pretty much everywhere has PFAS in the water. Some areas just don’t have it as much as others. So, we continued to survey locals, and then COVID-19 hit and nothing else happened.”

Since the first research project stopped, Guerry said, she wanted to pick up a similar procedure of survey for her dissertation.

She said she decided to conduct qualitative data by interviewing people in the Cape Fear region close to Wilmington, to get an idea of how locals respond to contaminated water.

“I’m interviewing people through a snowball sampling method,” Guerry said. “Some people have given me names of people to interview that live in the area. My goal is to talk to families and just get an idea of how stressed they are and if that stress has something to do with the knowledge of drinking water that’s contaminated. They know they shouldn’t be drinking it because its contaminants are above the health advisory.”

Guerry said some residents may not know their drinking water was above the standards because the standards have changed over the last couple of years. 

In her interviews, Guerry said, she asks questions like the following:

• Where do you get your knowledge of contaminated water from?
• How is the contamination affecting your community?
• What is your confidence in the knowledge you have been given about PFAS?
• How do you feel about the information you were given from nonprofit organizations, the local government, and the federal government?
• Is there something you don’t understand and want to have more help on?
• Do you think the contamination is related to other environmental issues?

While conducting the interviews, she said, she is not just looking at an individual scale, but also a family and town scale to get a broader view of the situation in the Cape Fear area.

The reasoning behind the area she chose, Guerry said, was because she herself was affected by an evacuation due to water contamination when she was living in Wilmington.

“Some people seriously question if their kids should be drinking the water there,” Guerry said. “PFAS might be the number one issue. But to somebody that has a house that might be in a flood zone, there might be bigger problems involved. Such problems might be other pollutants.”

Guerry said the way she gets people to have an interview with her is by networking. She said she goes into the area and talks to one person and then asks that person if they know someone else who might be affected by polluted water.

Genevieve Guerry at the North Carolina Coastal Conference presenting her research about PFAS Perceptions (Photo contributed by Guerry).

Since her research includes human subjects, Guerry said, she needs to await official approval by the Institutional Review Board to complete her research. The money she received from the Water Resources Center, she said, will then be used to cover her driving expenses to get from Virginia to North Carolina.

“I established this project to build that bridge between academia, advocacy organizations, and community members,” Guerry said. “I want to provide people with some kind of a PFAS understanding and its consequences. If it’s overwhelming for me, I’m assuming it’s probably overwhelming for other people as well.”

For her future, Guerry said, she originally planned to pursue a career at the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

Now, after considering having a better work-life balance, she said, she would like to become a writer or co-write a book.

“I think it would be cool to write a book on what has happened in Wilmington in regard to water contamination”, Guerry said. “I simply want to continue doing advocacy and eventually be a mom, maybe in the next five years.”

About Me

Name: Genevieve Lucille Guerry

Age: 30

College: Thomas Harriot College of Arts & Sciences

Classification/Focus: P.h.D Candidate in the Integrated Coastal Sciences Program at ECU

Hometown: Fort Bragg, North Carolina

Bachelor of Science: Marine Science

Master of Science: Coastal and Ocean Policy

Dream job(s): Faculty Member, Writer, Mother

What are PFAS?

PFAS is short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances.

• PFAS are widely used, long lasting chemicals, components of which break down very slowly over time.
• Because of their widespread use and their persistence in the environment, many PFAS are found in the blood of people and animals all over the world and are present at low levels in a variety of food products and in the environment.
  
• PFAS are found in water, air, fish, and soil at locations across the nation and the globe.
• Scientific studies have shown that exposure to some PFAS in the environment may be linked to harmful health effects in humans and animals.

• There are thousands of PFAS chemicals, and they are found in many different consumer, commercial, and industrial products. This makes it challenging to study and assess the potential human health and environmental risks.

(Source: EPA) 

What are GenX chemicals?

GenX is a member of a large group of man-made chemical compounds known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). PFAS are man-made chemicals that do not occur naturally in the environment. These chemicals have broad uses in commercial products such as food packaging, nonstick coatings, and firefighting foam.

GenX is a trade name for one unregulated PFAS used in manufacturing nonstick coatings and for other purposes. It is also produced as a byproduct of certain manufacturing processes.

(Source: NCDHHS)