Dr. Tran’s research at the Wadsworth Center involves the Food Emergency Response Network (FERN) program of the Division of Environmental Health Sciences. His primary work focuses on the analysis of unknown chemicals in foods including toxic compounds and terrorist chemical agents to identify threats to the US food supply and provide national surveillance of food security. Contamination of food by toxic chemicals could be a severe concern for the safety of the human food supply. This work is important in evaluating and estimating the potential of chemical agents to affect human health, and in preventing a large-scale contamination or emergency.

Another area of research interest is establishing and validating methods for the analysis of toxic chemicals in the environment including aldehydes, pesticides, persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and mycotoxins. Research is conducted on physical-chemistry methods for sample extraction, substance isolation and structural identification by analytical techniques such as gas and liquid chromatography, mass spectrometry, infrared, ultraviolet and nuclear magnetic resonance.

Dr. Tran also collaborates with other scientists at the Wadsworth Center for the analysis of POPs in human specimens.