Environmental Engineering Special Seminar:

TITLE: Towards the Partitioning Based Laboratory for Organic Pollutants

Prof. Philipp Mayer, Technical University of Denmark, Department of Environmental Engineering

TRC 206; Sep 21, 2016 Noon – 1 pm

“Partitioning” is crucial for the fate, exposure and effects of organic chemicals in the environment. However, it can also be utilized in a wide range of partitioning based approaches within the environmental laboratory. The presentation will provide an overview of almost 20 years of research on partitioning based techniques with special emphasis on equilibrium sampling, passive dosing, sorptive bioaccessibility extractions & pull-push systems.  Such approaches have been applied for studying and understanding “bioavailability”, co-transport, (mixture) toxicity, binding to molecular scale constituents, the thermodynamics of bioaccumulation and biotransformation.

Speaker Bio:

Philipp Mayer is professor in applied environmental chemistry at DTU and member of the Danish Council for Independent Research in Technology and Production Sciences (FTP). He has previously been professor at the National Environmental Research Institute (Aarhus University, DK) and study director at the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO, NL). He received his M.Sc. degree from the Technical University of Denmark (DK) and the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee (US), and received his doctoral degree in 2000 at the Research Institute of Toxicology, Utrecht University (NL).

Prof. Mayer has a research focus on partitioning based analytical technology and the fate, exposure and effects of organic contaminants in the environment. He has for instance introduced the first “equilibrium sampling methods” for measuring freely dissolved concentrations of hydrophobic organic chemicals in sediments. He has also developed “passive dosing” as a new experimental and analytical platform for environmental toxicity research and testing of hydrophobic organic chemicals. Some of his recent research aims at linking toxicity to the chemical activity of organic chemicals, with special emphasis on highly hydrophobic organic chemicals and their mixtures. Philipp Mayer has supervised more than 40 environmental toxicity studies (GLP) and served as convener for the ISO working group “toxicity to aquatic plants” (TC147/SC5/WG5). He has authored >100 publications of which 95 are in international refereed scientific journals.