Franklin Leach
Assistant Professor
Department of Chemistry
Franklin College of Arts and Sciences
Leach Lab

Franklin Leach is a chemist. 

But looking at the data from a stream monitoring probe in Tanyard Branch, he’s philosophical. 

“The stream is breathing. You can see the stream’s respiration,” he said, pointing to the computer dashboard for the equipment. The chart shows a regular cycle of oxygen in the water – much like a healthy sinus rhythm for a person – as oxygen rises during the day due to photosynthesis, and falls at night due to respiration. To him, it is alive and inspires wonder.

Leach is a chemist, but with elements of geology, ecology, physics … and a little philosophy.  In his mind, there are no bounds that define disciplines. It is all connected, all the time.

“We have this picture of the chemist in the lab—and I do that—but I’m also out here in the field a lot. This is where I started and it’s one of my favorite places now,” he said. 

Leach is an assistant professor in the Chemistry Department of the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. 

As an affiliate of the River Basin Center, Leach manages monitoring equipment at the confluence of two branches of Tanyard Creek, streams that come together just south of Bolton Dining Hall in the middle of UGA campus. Tanyard Branch is a learning lab for UGA students from multiple colleges, and the monitoring equipment will provide data for all sorts of research projects in the future. 

“Tanyard Branch is a really good example of an urban stream with the infrastructure pressures and fugitive water that makes its way to it,” Leach said. When silt fences surrounding construction projects fail, Tanyard Branch quickly changes color. If an aging sanitary sewer pipe leaks, samples will look very different in summer (when much of Baxter Hill is uninhabited) and in fall, when students are back in the dorms.

When Leach took responsibility for the equipment on Tanyard Branch earlier this year, it was in need of some TLC after years of exposure to the elements, so, he had to repair and refurbish it, then quickly get baseline readings before students returned to campus in early August. The monitoring equipment is supplied by YSI, the manufacturer, through a special arrangement with the River Basin Center.

The sensors are now taking readings every five minutes, collecting data on standard water quality parameters such as temperature, turbidity, conductivity, dissolved oxygen, pH, depth and rainfall. Additional sensors will be added in the future to expand the measurement scope and provide insights related to key aquatic chemistry questions, such as how dissolved organic carbon moves through urban streams.

The data is transmitted wirelessly and populates a dashboard that will allow students to employ real world data from their own campus surroundings and facilitate true experiential learning. Twice a month, Leach and his undergraduate research team take physical samples to test in the lab and pull the deployed gear monthly to recalibrate the equipment. 

Before he started grad school, Leach worked for five years in the environmental sector for both in state and federal agencies, as well as in private consulting. His responsibilities ranged from water quality monitoring and bird surveys to more regulatory pursuits including wetlands mitigation and compliance, and even stints on wildland and prescribed fire crews. This wide-ranging experience produced a scientist that was just as comfortable handling chemical instrumentation as he was in waist deep waters with alligators and banding secretive marsh birds.  

“Most chemists go into a lab, but I had a boat and water monitoring gear,” he said.  As a technician, he was responsible for implementing a standardized NOAA protocol to assess the water quality at the Grand Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve in the southeast corner of Mississippi.  In this dynamic setting, every day was a new adventure.

In his lab at UGA, Leach now employs mass spectrometry, a chemical measurement technique capable of interrogating complex molecular mixtures such as those found in the environment.  In the early part of his independent career, these tools were employed to examine the impacts of environmental exposure but have now pivoted to directly explore aspects of aquatic chemistry including the physical and chemical processes of the hyporheic zone, commonly known as a river’s liver.  

His research seeks to further our understanding of the natural world and also develop technologies to enable chemical measurements.  Prior to joining the faculty at UGA, he was a staff scientist for the Department of Energy and built a high-performance mass spectrometer that now serves the global scientific community in the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory user facility.  

Whether in a stream or a lab, he’s measuring, Leach said, and he tries to help students to see how applicable chemistry is in the real world. 

“Chemistry has an optics problem,” he said. Prospective students check out physics and can see themselves working with images and data from the James Webb Space Telescope to explore space. Other students visit biology or ecology and can see themselves working directly animals and ecosystems that they’ve always admired. 

It’s harder to see how chemistry whispers clues about everything that’s going on in the other sciences, Leach said.  We are visual animals and people care about and are largely interested in what they can see.

“But chemistry is a language. You can use it anyway you want to,” he said. 

He makes that point in a First Year Odyssey Seminar that uses campus streams to show students how chemistry is a key part of the interdisciplinary work to understand and protect water.   

“It’s all chemistry. Conductivity is chemistry; it’s all the ionic components of the water. pH is chemistry; it’s a measure of how acidic or basic a water body may be.  Dissolved oxygen is chemistry; it’s gas solubility in liquids.” 

“It’s all fundamental chemistry – chemistry in the real world.”