This year, Daniel Snow will retire from the University of Nebraska faculty, stepping down as the Director of the Water Sciences Laboratory and leaving behind a legacy that has impacted every part of the lab. Serving as Director over the last 22 years, Snow has worked closely with almost every student, faculty, staff, and visiting scholar who has used the facility. “It is hard for me not to be personally attached to the lab,” he says, “when I have been involved from the very beginning.”
When Snow moved to Lincoln to pursue a Ph.D. in geochemistry in 1986, he didn’t expect to spend a good part of the following four decades building one of the most advanced water research labs in the country. The lab was established by the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's East Campus in 1990. Its founding director, Roy Spalding, encouraged Snow to apply to be its first laboratory manager. Halfway through a Ph.D. program supervised by Spalding, Snow jumped at the chance to run a state-of- the-art analytical laboratory aimed at supporting water research in Nebraska and beyond.
When the lab began, there were only ten or twelve major instruments to support facility users conducting water quality and quantity research in Nebraska. Samples and results were tracked using paper forms and spreadsheets. Today, the facility supports more than thirty major instruments, many based on advanced mass spectrometry technologies, and is implementing a new cloud-based information system allowing clients from across the globe to submit samples, select methods, and access their results online.
Snow describes the early days, “Our first instruments were not nearly as sensitive and fast as the new triple quadrupole mass spectrometers we now use. Faster scan rates, automated data processing, and improved instrument interfaces have helped make our methods much more robust.” These changes didn’t happen overnight, but under Snow’s leadership the lab grew from less than 20 methods and three full time staff members to more than 200 methods supported by five full time staff members operating $3.5 million in sophisticated laboratory equipment. The growth of the lab reflects years of hard work and close collaboration between faculty, students, agencies, and partners across Nebraska and the world.
Snow has been a part of some of the lab’s most impactful research. One of his early breakthroughs involved developing methods to measure traces of antibiotics in livestock wastewater using liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry.
“I remember giving a talk on our method and receiving an award at the American Chemical Society national meeting in 2001 when our method was first published,” Snow said. “It is still one of the earliest and still highly cited papers describing how to measure these biologically important chemicals in wastewater.” Analysis of antibiotics in agricultural, domestic, and municipal wastewater are among the most commonly requested methods owing to their potential for affecting antibiotic resistance. Together with methods for detection of new emerging contaminants such as per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (aka PFAS) and multiple pesticides screens, the lab serves a variety of projects and priorities to ensure safe water for multiple uses worldwide.
The lab’s work aims to measure and understand sources of contamination and then devise ways to remediate and protect water resources. “The main reason we measure the substances we do is to understand how water becomes contaminated so we understand the consequences and, when necessary, reduce the incidence and impact of contamination,” Snow said. “The lab tests most water and environmental samples to inform decisions about the way we use natural resources. Agriculture can always be more efficient and sustainable, and the technology in the lab provides answers that can stimulate new ideas and innovation.”
After decades of service, Snow's vision for his legacy, and legacy of the lab, is focused on supporting science with purpose. “The legacy I want to leave is showing how we can use science, particularly chemical and isotope analysis, to better manage and protect our water resources worldwide,” he said.
He credits Nebraska as part of his story, emphasizing that there is no better place to study and understand groundwater. For him, this lab is more than instruments and methods, it represents the generations of students trained, partnerships built and knowledge shared, in collaboration to protect the world’s most valuable resource.
