Elsie Sunderland studies how biogeochemical processes affect the fate, transport and food-web bioaccumulation of trace metals and organic chemicals in aquatic ecosystems. She began work tracing mercury in the marine food web in the late 1990s as a Ph.D. student in environmental toxicology at Simon Fraser University. After completing her degree, she held several positions at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, working on air pollution policy and regulation and the use of models at EPA. She came to Harvard as a research associate and joined the faculty of the Chan School as an assistant professor of aquatic science in 2010. She joined the engineering faculty in 2014. She is associated with both the Harvard University Center for the Environment and the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis. Her group develops and applies models at a variety of scales ranging from ecosystems and ocean basins to global applications to characterize how changes in climate and emissions affect human and ecological health and assess the potential impacts of regulatory activities.