William Andrew Thompson

I am a Mitacs Post-doctoral Fellow at McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario) in the department of biology. I'm a developmental toxicologist, and my work delves into trying to understand our impacts on aquatic life. As carekeepers of this planet, humans haven't really done a great job. We have released pharmaceuticals, personal care products, single-use plastics, and other contaminants into aquatic environments through our wastewater, and we don't really know what their consequences would be in habitats receiving municipal wastewater effluent. I like to investigate the damage these contaminants may have on early-life stages of fish, because these critical windows of development can have life-long effects. I look at these animals from the top-down, finding changes in their behaviour, and then looking under the hood to see what part of the engine is malfunctioning.