Department of Biological and Chemical Engineering

Research group Microbial technologies for clean water

Research interest

Engineering biochemical processes for water treatment is my main research interest. I investigate interactions  between organisms and pollutants and develop advanced biotechnologies to combat environmental pollution. 

My current research focusses on:

• Advanced water treatment technologies for removal of micropollutants.
• Effect-directed bioanalytical technologies to bridge the gap between biological and chemical water quality assessment. 
• Microbial technologies for recovery of carbon and energy from wastewater
• Oil spill biodegradation in Arctic marine environments (seawater, sea ice, sediment) by means of both laboratory and field experiments (focus on Greenland). 

Areas of expertise

• Analytical organic chemistry - screening - chemometrics
  I am expert in chromatographic and mass spectrometric techniques. I developed LC-MS based chemometric techniques to screen and quantify micropollutants in water and advanced GC-MS-based oil-fingerprinting techniques to investigate oil degradation processes.
• Environmental fate of organic pollutants
  I study the fate of pollutants including micropollutants such as pharmaceuticals and oil residues in drinking water, terrestrial aquatic environments, wastewater treatment and in marine environments
• Environmental microbiology
  Using molecular biology techniques (high-throughput sequencing) and bioinformatics, I investigate microbial-oil interactions and oil bioremediation processes.
• Multivariate statistics
  I apply and improve multivariate statistics for data mining and to reach a thorough understanding of complex processes