Melissa Beauchemin is an environmental scientist with over 20 years of experience contributing to approximately 100 ecological risk assessments on behalf of government agencies, potentially responsible parties, and industrial clients in the railroad, paper, pharmaceutical, chemical, real estate, and petroleum markets. She specialises in preparing technical documents for complex sites, ranging from small upland habitats to broad-scale offshore assessment and from the local to national scale. She has worked on projects conducted at Department of Defense sites (e.g., US Navy, US Army Corps of Engineers [USACE], US Air Force), national parks, and Superfund sites across the country. She brings extensive expertise and knowledge of unique compounds, such as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), neonicotinoid pesticides, and explosives, as well as traditional contaminants including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), heavy metals, dioxins/furans, and petroleum compounds and the associated ecotoxicity and thresholds available for use in risk assessments.

Melissa’s skills include screening-level and baseline quantitative terrestrial and aquatic risk assessments, food web modelling, and developing remedial action objectives and preliminary remediation goals to support risk management strategies. She is experienced in all aspects of the risk assessment process, from sampling design and fieldwork to data management and evaluation. As a Principal Investigator in an aquatic toxicology laboratory, she led acute and chronic toxicity studies with fish and invertebrates and is well versed in sampling and analytical procedures for water, sediment, and biota. She assists clients with sediment characterisation for dredged material disposal and permitting. With her extensive experience representing clients involved with high-profile, litigious environmental issues, she has a proven history of assisting clients achieve their environmental goals in a strategic and cost-efficient manner.