His research team has recently been applying this expertise towards understanding potential human health implications of psychoactive pharmaceuticals (e.g., Prozac) that end up in aquatic systems. They use minnows, cell cultures, and other model systems to determine the totality of genes expressed in response to these environmental contaminants, and relate this response to human neurological disorders. This project was initiated while Thomas was on sabbatical at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, and is leading to a much larger interdisciplinary collaborative ISU project involving environmental toxicology of nanomaterials in environmental systems.