Dr. Tratnyek’s expertise is in environmental chemistry, especially the fate, effects and remediation of contaminants. Research areas include treatment processes for removing metals and organic contaminants from water, corrosion of iron and other metals, environmental aspects of nanomaterials, and statistical/computational methods for estimating substance properties that are needed for assessments of environmental fate and risk.

He served as a research associate at the Swiss Federal Institute for Water Resources and Water Pollution Control from 1989 to 1991. In 1991, he joined the faculty of the Department of Environmental Science and Engineering at the Oregon Graduate Institute, which later became the Department of Environmental and Biomolecular Systems and then the Institute of Environmental Health at OHSU.