The National PFAS Conference Is Coming to Tucson. Here’s How U of A Is Leading Research on These Problematic Chemicals
The Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy has a new research lab that is looking at the regulatory framework associated with one of the most critical environmental challenges of the modern era.
The RIPPLES lab, which stands for “Research in Pollutant Policy for Environment and Society,” is led by Udall Center researchers Gemma Smith, Adriana Zuniga-Teran and Andrea K. Gerlak. The diverse group of scholars is evaluating the policy landscape associated with a specific class of contaminants that have been found in the blood of nearly every person on the planet and have been linked to cancers, endocrine and reproductive issues, and other severe health risks.
Per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances, commonly known as “forever chemicals” or PFAS, are a category of molecules that includes several thousand chemicals with properties that make them water and heat resistant. These features have proven extremely desirable in commercial and industrial applications ranging from food packaging to firefighting foam and practically everything else in between.
Over the course of several decades, such broad use of PFAS has led them to infiltrate even the most remote corners of the globe. Forever chemicals have been found in everything from produce being grown in the U.S. to penguin eggs in Antarctica.
We spoke with Udall Center Assistant Research Professor and Assistant Professor of Government and Public Policy Gemma Smith about the new RIPPLES lab, the impact of PFAS on health and the environment, and the upcoming National PFAS Conference at the U of A in early June.
Here are some highlights from that conversation:
Seven PFAS Research and National Conference Questions with Assistant Professor Gemma Smith
Q: What are PFAS and how are they used?
GS: There are several thousand different types of chemicals that we could define as PFAS and the definitions are sometimes a bit murky.
We produce these chemicals to do a range of different things. They are really valuable to us because they have properties of being water, heat, grease and stain resistant. We use them in things like waterproof clothing and nonstick pans – really just about every different commercial, industrial or domestic application that you could think of, there is a use for PFAS chemicals in some way, shape or form. It's in fast food packaging. It’s in the carpet in our homes. They are incredibly ubiquitous chemicals.
Q: Why should people be concerned about PFAS contamination?
GS: All of those things that make PFAS really useful also make them really hard to get rid of and break down. For this reason they are very persistent in the environment. Essentially, all of these PFAS that we've been putting into products for decades now, when we dispose of them, they end up in the environment.
They're getting moved around in different ways through water, through our food systems, through air. And we have not been doing a good job of regulating or tracking that, or managing how we clean them up once they get into the environment. So, over the last few decades, we've been discovering that this is a really huge contamination issue.
We’ve got PFAS now confirmed pretty much in the blood of every single person on the planet. It's in our brains and tissues. It's in the Arctic. It's in polar bears and remote communities in Greenland. So we have this incredibly widespread problem.
And we know from growing research in the health sciences that these chemicals cause a lot of different adverse health effects to humans and to the environment in terms of different cancers, endocrine and thyroid disruptions and many other things. So, it's a huge issue that basically every country in the world has to confront.
Q: How long have these chemicals been in use and how long have we known they are dangerous?
GS: PFAS were discovered in the 1930s and began being used in commercial products shortly thereafter.
3M And DuPont were the first companies manufacturing PFAS. And what we know now from investigative reporting is that their own internal testing and processes show us they did know about the toxicity of these compounds before it ever became public knowledge or was disclosed to the EPA. Establishing liability for contamination and the costs of its clean-up is actually what is behind a lot of the lawsuits that have been brought against these chemical manufacturers in more recent years.
Regulatory and public knowledge of what was happening with PFAS in the U.S. didn't really start coming into the fore until the late 1990s and early 2000s. One of the earliest states to act was Minnesota, where the state regulatory agency started testing for PFAS because Minnesota has a lot of manufacturing industries and they had past experiences of contamination. Among other things, the headquarters of 3M is in Minnesota. So, they were pretty proactive in testing. They discovered they had PFAS contamination and brought one of the earliest lawsuits against 3M back in the early 2000s. Actions to address PFAS have been slowly picking up steam from there, though much more in recent years, with the scientific community building the evidence base for certain health impacts and establishing causality.
Not surprisingly, the governance response has been evolving slower off the back of this research as we've been developing that scientific evidence base.
Q: Why are PFAS so hard to control and regulate?
GS: So there's a few different reasons for this.
First of all, how widespread it is: the fact that PFAS have basically gotten into every system on the planet at this point and everybody's bodies, so the scale of the problem alone is really challenging.
There's also the concentration levels or the levels of exposure and compounding exposures. We're finding that a lot of communities that have particularly acute PFAS exposures are also those that have been exposed to other industrial contaminants in the past, like what we've seen here in Tucson with the south side community. They were exposed to TCE and 1,4-Dioxane around the Superfund site that we have here. And then, more recently, PFAS were discovered, as well. That’s another contaminant they've been exposed to for several decades. We're seeing those kinds of patterns emerge.
Then there's the diversity. As I mentioned, there are several thousand different types of PFAS, and it feels a bit like playing whack-a-mole to regulate them all individually. When the federal Environmental Protection Agency released the first enforceable standards for drinking water in 2024, that only covered six individual PFAS chemicals. But that's six compounds out of an estimated 15,000 different chemicals.
And we're seeing that, where regulations are being brought in on some of these better understood, older PFAS compounds, which are longer chain molecules, companies are switching instead to different forms of PFAS which have the same properties but are not regulated. These are often shorter chain PFAS, which are potentially more mobile in the environment and we know less about the implications for human and environmental health impacts from them.
Q: What research is taking place on PFAS at U of A and where does RIPPLES fit in that schema?
GS: We're really lucky at the U of A, we've got a really amazing complement of researchers from different disciplines who are attacking the problem from all angles.
We've got people who are trying to understand how PFAS move in the environment through soils and groundwater and surface waters. We've got people who are looking at the human exposure pathways. So, once it's in the environment, how is it getting into our bodies via things like dust inhalation or if you have little kids, are they running around sticking their hands in dirt and putting their hands in their mouths and are they getting exposed to PFAS through all those kinds of things that kids do? And then we have researchers who have been looking at the different ways that PFAS impact health once they get into your body.
The regulatory and policy side of this issue is something that's been neglected in academic research
until very recently, in part because we’ve been really focused on getting the science side right before moves can really start to be made on the governance and regulatory side by the federal government, by states and by local governments. But that story is really changing now, and I think practice has gotten ahead of academia in many cases.
Some local governments and states have been aware of the contamination for at least the better part of a decade now and have been trying to address these in local- or state-based ways. That's created this patchwork of different governance approaches all across the U.S.
When our research group started looking at this at the beginning of 2024, we realized that there wasn’t much happening in terms of policy and political science research that can help us to make sense of the trends that we're seeing here. What are the factors influencing how stringent we’re able to be on PFAS in certain areas? Or, what's the right level of government to be trying to pull different governance levers? And so that is where we sit and what we're trying to do to make sense of how science should bridge into policy and at the appropriate level through our work in the RIPPLES lab.
Q: What should people know about the 2026 National PFAS Conference taking place at the U of A in June?
GS: This is intended to be a very inclusive event. It's not like a traditional academic conference. It's really meant to be a meeting point for scientists, for policymakers, and for communities to talk about PFAS in a very holistic way.
There's a big emphasis on impacted community members being able to attend and build community and learn about the latest science and policy updates from experts. And it’s worth remembering, whether you know it or not, we are likely all impacted in some way.
We will also have policy and litigation leaders there from across the country and from the state of Arizona. We'll have leading scientific experts from a variety of different fields to talk about issues such as health effects, a special session on children’s health, and the latest methods to remove PFAS from the environment and from humans. We will also have sessions and tours specifically focused on the experience of PFAS in Arizona, including the south side community here in Tucson, rural communities in Santa Cruz County, and Indigenous perspectives and exposures. This is the first time the conference has been held west of the Mississippi and it’s an important opportunity to explore how the experiences and implications of PFAS exposure differ with our unique history and desert climate.
And the conference is open to everyone. So we really encourage students and community members to come along and attend. There's a reduced fee for students and this is a really good opportunity to learn about science, policy, and the history of our communities all in one place.
There’s going to be a really good, interesting set of perspectives there. And, for each of the different topic areas across the whole program, we always have a community voice who puts these things into context of what this means on the ground for communities who are impacted. That's a really special part of the conference, as well.
Q: What is the significance of the National PFAS Conference being held in Tucson this year?
GS: I think part of the reason that Tucson won the bid to host this year is because we're really at the nexus of a lot of different things in the PFAS landscape, which is quite a bit different in the west than it is in the east where all of the previous Nation PFAS Conferences have taken place.
We are particularly exposed to issues related to mining, agriculture and the impacts of PFAS on Tribal communities here, as well as the broader challenge of managing PFAS in a water-scarce region. It’s not so easy to dilute polluted water here. Or decisions, for example, to shut down contaminated drinking water sources could create serious water supply issues. So, these are important issues that we're trying to bring out in the conference agenda.
Tucson is really one of the local communities that has been at the forefront of this issue. The city has a legacy as an impacted community with what's happened with PFAS and other contaminants on the south side. We first discovered PFAS around 2009 in Tucson because of voluntary testing that the utility (Tucson Water) was doing. It wasn't part of any mandated regulatory efforts. And, for where we are now in terms of the local response, it is much more developed than in many other parts of the country.
Tucson is often looked to as a leader in that respect, but also has this extremely complex legacy of contamination and compounding exposures for the communities here. So, it’s really important to be able to tell those stories and bring them to the national stage.
Registration for the 2026 National PFAS Conference is now open. The event will take place at the U of A on June 8-10, 2026.