Arturo Keller

About

Arturo Keller is a Distinguished Professor at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at UC Santa Barbara. His research focuses on the sustainable use of chemicals and materials in modern society, emphasizing understanding and quantifying their potential impacts while seeking ways to minimize these impacts and achieve benefits. He has a particular interest in emerging materials such as nanoparticles and biochemicals, for which limited information is available. Additionally, Dr. Keller conducts large-scale work to design improved management strategies for common chemicals like fertilizers and pesticides. Dr. Keller is known for his involvement in the phasing out of the gasoline additive MTBE, where his research demonstrated its serious effects on water resources and its modest air quality benefits compared to alternatives. He facilitated the award-winning Nitrogen TMDL process for the Santa Clara River, which successfully reached consensus through science-supported decision-making and stakeholder collaboration, earning the 2003 H. David Nahai Water Quality Award. His work with Regional Water Quality Control Boards on various TMDL processes has advanced watershed-scale water quality modeling and management. He teaches courses on Sustainable Watershed Management and is recognized for his expertise in the fate and transport of pollutants, including organic liquids and pesticides. His research team has developed technologies to address water-quality problems,…

Research topics

• Biology
• Materials science
• Environmental chemistry
• Environmental science
• Chemistry
• Nanotechnology
• Agronomy
• Computer Science
• Ecology
• Environmental resource management

Selected publications

• Nanobiotechnology-based strategies for enhanced crop stress resilience

  Nature Food · 2022 · 244 citations

  Nanobiotechnology approaches to engineering crops with enhanced stress tolerance may be a safe and sustainable strategy to increase crop yield. Under stress conditions, cellular redox homeostasis is disturbed, resulting in the over-accumulation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) that damage biomolecules (lipids, proteins and DNA) and inhibit crop growth and yield. Delivering ROS-scavenging nanomaterials to plants has been shown to alleviate abiotic stress. Here we review the current state of knowl…

  DOI

• Occurrence and risk assessment of emerging contaminants in a water reclamation and ecological reuse project

  The Science of The Total Environment · 2020 · 147 citations

  DOI

• Quantifying the Dynamics of Polystyrene Microplastics UV-Aging Process

  Environmental Science & Technology Letters · 2021 · 125 citations

  Massive amounts of plastic waste have been released into ecosystems, generating huge amounts of microplastics (MPs) and nanoplastics (NPs) during the environmental aging process. However, particle size and number dynamics along the aging process have not been quantitatively assessed, which can greatly influence their fate and environmental risk assessment. We applied single particle inductively coupled plasma mass spectroscopy (spICP-MS) to quantitatively analyze the polystyrene (PS) MPs aging p…

  DOI

• Developing trends in nanomaterials and their environmental implications

  Nature Nanotechnology · 2023-06-06 · 111 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Nano and traditional copper and zinc antifouling coatings: metal release and impact on marine sessile invertebrate communities

  Journal of Nanoparticle Research · 2020 · 80 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

Recent grants

• DEVELOPING AND INTEGRATING "-OMIC" TOOLS TO ELUCIDATE NANOPARTICLE TRANSPORT MECHANISM AND RESPONSES IN AGRICULTURAL CROPS

  NSF · $390k · 2019–2022

Frequent coauthors

• Yuxiong Huang

  Tsinghua–Berkeley Shenzhen Institute

  121 shared

• Adeyemi S. Adeleye

  University of California, Irvine

  70 shared

• Hongtao Wang

  Tsinghua University

  64 shared

• Hunter S. Lenihan

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  54 shared

• Omid Bozorg‐Haddad

  University of Tehran

  51 shared

• Ali Arefinia

  University of Tehran

  51 shared

• Babak Zolghadr‐Asli

  University of Queensland

  51 shared

• Arman Oliazadeh

  50 shared

Labs

• Arturo Keller's Research GroupPI

Awards & honors

• 2003 H. David Nahai Water Quality Award

Similar researchers at University of California, Santa Barbara

• Steve Gainesh-110
• Sally MacIntyreh-88
• Mateo Robbinsh-71