Jacqueline Quinn

Dr. Jacqueline Quinn trained as a civil engineer at Georgia Institute of Technology and then focused on environmental engineering in graduate school at the University of Central Florida. She works at NASA and is the scientist who invented emulsified zero-valent iron, a means of remediating environmental contaminants. In this technique, iron particles are added to oil, water, and a chemical that makes them mix. They are injected into sediment contaminated with chlorine-containing chemicals and the contaminants migrate into the emulsion, where they interact with the iron and degrade into harmless chemicals. Dr. Quinn has also worked on a program to remove PCBs from sediment by attracting and trapping the chemicals in filled hollow spikes put into the ground. The spikes can be removed, and the PCBs destroyed without need for huge sediment disruption. Dr. Quinn now serves as a project manager for NASA’s VIPER project to return to the moon. In this capacity, she is leading the development of two of the four tools the space vehicle will use to study the moon’s surface.