SEAS Professor Silvia Newell: Researching how excess nutrients affect water quality

By Margaret Fornes (MS ’25) (article first published by the UM School for Environment and Sustainability)

 

As a middle schooler, Silvia Newell was a member of her school’s Science Olympiad team, which sparked her interest in science and chemistry. Newell reached out to a family friend to learn more about the Periodic Table and eventually ended up working as an assistant in his lab. Now, Newell is a professor at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) and the director of the Michigan Sea Grant. Her experiences in high school and college, where she studied biogeochemistry, started her journey to this role, and her research along the way fostered her interest in nutrient cycles and water quality.

 

During her first year in college, Newell conducted research in Antarctica with a geochemistry team, which was a pivotal experience for her future career. “I was so excited to be there, see the world, and experience the things we were studying in real life,” she reflects. “I was doing geochemistry on the trip and was intrigued by how it would fit in with the team’s microbiology work, and I reinvented biogeochemistry.”

After that trip, Newell continued to pursue her interest in biogeochemistry. “I traveled to Hawaii for a semester to take a course on the subject, and I was totally sold,” says Newell. “I knew the work was really important to understand major nutrient cycles across the world and would help other scientists understand nutrient flow in their systems.”

Biogeochemistry is the study of how chemicals move and cycle through their systems, so Newell believed pursuing her interest in nutrient cycles would also allow her to contribute to helping steward the protection of oceans and inland seas. Her next step was to earn her PhD at Princeton University to continue studying the topics that were important to her. “I got trained as an oceanographer to protect water. Water is the most important thing, and we have to have clean water,” explains Newell. “I wanted my education to support that goal.”

After earning her PhD, Newell moved back to her home state of Ohio in 2014, right before the Toledo Water Crisis, where toxic cyanobacterial blooms in Lake Erie infiltrated drinking water for the city of Toledo. Being in Ohio at that time solidified for Newell how she could use her degree to support clean water in Ohio and to increase the health of Lake Erie. Some of her research had focused on hypereutrophic lakes, or lakes that are extremely polluted by excess nutrients, an issue that can reduce water quality in places like Lake Erie. This spurred Newell to put her skills to use in the Great Lakes region, as the algal blooms in Lake Erie sparked many local and regional conversations about the role of phosphorus in water bodies and how that impacts the ecological integrity of the Great Lakes.

“The compounds in this algae that make them toxic have lots of nitrogen and no phosphorus, so that means that nitrogen has a major role here to play, too, and there were very few people focusing on nitrogen in the Great Lakes at that time,” explains Newell.

“I thought I had the skills to do effective analysis on the nitrogen data and show scientists why it’s as important as the phosphorus data, so I started working with the data and I have been doing that for the last 10 years.”

Working in the Maumee River watershed to Lake Erie, Newell began to better understand how complicated it could be to call for reduced nitrogen runoff in the Great Lakes region in order to improve drinking water quality and the health of the Great Lakes. To navigate these complexities in her work, Newell partnered with social scientists to develop recommendations for how the needed nitrogen load reduction could be achieved using methods that managers already use to reduce phosphorus and farmers would be willing to enact. “Sea Grant forms a bridge between science and communities. Our hope is that by working with Michigan and Ohio Sea Grants, we can share our recommendations for reducing both phosphorus and nitrogen simultaneously in order to reduce toxic algae blooms in Lake Erie,” says Newell.

When the opportunity to work as the director of the Michigan Sea Grant came up, Newell was excited to apply and step into the role. “I like that Sea Grant is science for the people. We take science and use it to help people, both by funding research and then by translating that research into trusted information for real problems that communities are facing.”

In addition to her role with Michigan Sea Grant, Newell teaches a biogeochemistry course at SEAS, where she shares with her students the subject that has driven much of her career. “I want learning biogeochemistry to change the way my students see the world around them, and any ecosystem they find themselves in. I don’t want them to just see buildings and sidewalks, but to see all the components of the ecosystem they are in and be able to think about how our major nutrients move through the world,” says Newell.

Although Newell’s course gives students a fundamental understanding of nutrient flow and the structure of ecosystems, she notes that the course teaches students valuable ways to engage with scientific information and research. “The most powerful thing that any one person can do is to think critically about the information you’re receiving,” she explains. “Talk about the issues you care about, learn about them even further and share them with those around you. Climate change is not a problem that gets solved by one person’s action, but by collective action.”