The urban environment is a complex milieu where different social forces are unleashed. His research has been integral to a large interdisciplinary research project, funded by NASA, that has investigated how land cover and land use changes in the Atlanta metropolitan area over the past 25 years have affected meteorology and air quality over the city. The Lamar Dodd Award recognizes outstanding scientific work. Meagher has isolated and modified bacterial genes that can transform mercury in the soil and has inserted those genes into plants, transferring to the plants the bacterial abilities to detoxify heavy metals. His success in developing these transgenic plants has garnered widespread international interest.
Some bacteria detoxify toxic metals in polluted soils and water in order to survive.
Plants, on the other hand, generally cannot efficiently detoxify mercury or other heavy metals. They did not work. In 1995, however, the Meagher lab produced the first successful transgenic mer plants using a small plant, Arabidopsis thaliana. Thus the lab has successfully extended to plants the metal-ion reducing portion of the bacterial mer system for mercury detoxification. Current efforts are building a plant that will extract mercury from soil and water and hyperaccumulate it above ground.