Dr. Yong Cai from Florida International University paid a visit to IHB on December 25th, 2018.  

Dr. Yong Cai from Florida International University paid a visit to Institute of Hydrobiology (IHB) of Chinese Academy of Sciences on December 25th, 2018. During his visit, he gave an oral presentation entitled “Mercury: an element of surprise”.    

In his presentation, Dr. Cai elaborated the long history of mercury use in the world, including: the origin of mercury pollution, the global circulation, migration and transformation of mercury as well as the environmental behavior and fate of mercury from environmental media such as the atmosphere, soil and water.  

Through long-term field large-scale field investigations and model studies, Dr. Cai systematically analyzed the hazards of methylmercury enrichment in the food chain and pointed out that the current technical problems encountered in mercury pollution research around the world have aroused widespread interest.  

Dr. Cai is a professor at Florida International University, a recipient of the Outstanding Youth Fund of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Overseas), a part-time researcher at the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, member of the Academic Committee of the State Key Laboratory of Environmental Chemistry and Ecotoxicology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, dean of the Environmental Health Research Institute of Jianghan University, and member of the Academic Committee of the State Key Laboratory of Environmental and Biological Analysis of Hong Kong Baptist University. He is mainly engaged in the research of heavy metal biogeochemical processes and heavy metal pollution remediation. He has accumulated rich experience in morphological analysis of arsenic, mercury and biogeochemical cycles. Many research results are published on Nature, Nature Communications, and environment famous journals such as Environmental Science & Technology.