Diana M. Cardenas Soraca
Research Interests
Diana is a skilled analytical chemist who completed her PhD in Analytical Sciences and Technology in April 2020 at the Universidad de Concepción in Chile under the supervision of Prof. Ricardo Barra. Her doctoral research focused on the development and application of passive sampling and analytical methods for monitoring organic micropollutants in aquatic environments.
Since joining the Servos Lab in August 2022, she has initiated and led long-term wastewater-based surveillance efforts for psychoactive substances across multiple sites in Ontario. Her work focuses on developing and applying analytical methods to detect drugs of abuse and other emerging contaminants in environmental systems, with a strong emphasis on analytical robustness and environmental monitoring applications.
Her research focuses on developing and refining liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) methods to quantify specific high-risk substances in complex environmental matrices. This includes optimizing analytical workflows to improve sensitivity, selectivity, and reproducibility for trace-level detection in wastewater and surface waters.
She also works to characterize temporal variability in high-risk substances within wastewater-based surveillance (WBS) datasets, supporting improved interpretation of long-term trends. To enhance data comparability across sites and time, she applies normalization approaches using complementary wastewater parameters to reduce variability and strengthen analytical consistency.
She has participated in the EU SCORE interlaboratory comparison program, where her analytical results demonstrated strong agreement with international laboratories, reflected in consistently good z-scores. This external quality assurance provides important validation of method performance and analytical robustness.
In addition, she adapts and applies methods developed for WBS to investigate the fate of high-risk substances through wastewater treatment systems and into receiving surface waters, contributing to a broader understanding of their transport, persistence, and environmental behaviour.
Diana also plays a key role in fish exposure and bioaccumulation studies, working with native species such as rainbow darter (Etheostoma caeruleum), blackside darter (Percina maculata), and greenside darter (Etheostoma blennioides) to assess contaminant uptake in urban-impacted river systems.
This work involves significant analytical challenges due to the complexity of fish tissue matrices, requiring careful optimization of extraction and clean-up procedures to ensure accurate measurement of trace-level contaminants. To support this, Diana has contributed to the development and refinement of workflows that improve extraction efficiency and reduce matrix interferences.
Her research also includes controlled laboratory exposure experiments designed to link environmental concentrations with biological responses in fish under defined and reproducible conditions. In addition, she is interested in using Orbitrap mass spectrometry to investigate changes in lipidomic profiles associated with contaminant exposure in wild fish populations impacted by wastewater effluent.
