1. What interested you about this field of research?
2. What are the greatest difficulties you face as a researcher working on environmental issues?
3. In your opinion, what is the most important research question in environmental science?
Roman Ashauer develops ecotoxicological effect models, with a focus on toxicokinetic-toxicodynamic models. Besides the exciting scientific possibilities offered by a modelling based approach to ecotoxicology, Roman Ashauer is also motivated by the opportunity to create improved tools for risk assessment of chemicals. In 2007 he won the SETAC-CEFIC Innovative Science Award. When he is not in the lab or at the computer, Roman Ashauer enjoys rock climbing in and around the Alps as well as travelling and reading science fiction or autobiographies.
1. At first I was mainly interested in mechanistic effect modelling for fluctuating exposure concentrations. Now I'm more excited about the new possibilities that TKTD modelling offers as a conceptual framework. We can investigate systematically why species differ in their sensitivities and also get a better grip on predicting toxicity of untested compounds.
2. The greatest difficulty is one that is not specific to environmental issues: how to carry out research on “big questions”, which require a longer time horizon to investigate, when positions for researchers are mostly non-permanent.
3. What are the effects of exposure to many micropollutants for long durations, especially considering that we know nearly nothing about the response of the majority of organisms to chemical pollution?
1. My interest is mainly devoted to the possibility of exporting some of my experiences developed during my research to the environmental field. For example in my laboratory a new promising procedure for air particulate matter filter analysis, based on total reflection X-ray fluorescence (a technique originally developed for chemical analysis of semiconductors and thin layers) was developed. This methodology is much more sustainable than the standard ones.
2. In my opinion, many people working in the environmental field are not so open to new technologies. For example researchers working in materials science often prefer to use standardized techniques for contingencies, rather than to pioneer new methodologies.
3. It is very difficult to answer this question, because each field of environment science is fundamental. Moreover, at this particular moment, I think that science has the duty of pushing humans to reduce consumption of natural resources in order to preserve our world. For this aim scientists have to work not only to develop new technologies, but also to increase the social acceptance of their work.
1. My interest in this field developed around a desire to understand how environmental and ecosystem health can be influenced by humans and, conversely how human wellbeing is deeply connected to environmental and ecosystem health.
2. Arguably the most challenging aspect of working on the environmental issues, zoonoses and health is disentangling the complexity of links between candidate environmental variables and attributing causality in pathogen transmission.
3. Given increasing dominance of humans over many of the earth's ecosystems, changes in climate and the rise in emergent pathogens, it is important for scientists to ask under what situations are environmental changes likely to manifest in undesirable changes in ecological states; such as changes in biodiversity, health, and other ecosystem services.
1. My interest in the field of water and wastewater treatment stems from society's growing need for reliable and efficient strategies that promote water sustainability through reclamation and reuse. Current water supplies are challenged by a growing population, stressors from global climate change, and both traditional and emerging pollutant classes. These challenges motivate my research group to conduct work focusing on the optimization of traditional treatment approaches and the development of new technologies that may one day enable an increased reliance on reuse practices.
2. “Scale-up” is certainly a challenge. It requires a great deal of effort to make results obtained at the bench-scale in a laboratory meaningful for much larger, full-scale engineered systems, and even then you can still fall short. Similarly, it can be difficult to find the appropriate research balance between the need for fundamental understanding of process mechanisms and an appreciation for practical aspects of an optimized engineering application. These issues are further complicated by the diverse nature of multi-component, “real-world” environmental systems.
3. As a community, we must address how to develop safe, clean, and long-lasting drinking water supplies that are accessible to all populations around the globe. This must be done in a manner that utilizes appropriate technologies for specific communities, and does not compromise environmental quality or quality of life.
1. I was excited to discover that stable isotope analysis of organic contaminants can tell us the story about how these compounds are naturally degraded. Changes in isotope ratios are like a footprint of the degradation reaction that is imprinted in the remaining contaminant fraction. Coined by the kinetic isotope effect of the underlying transformation mechanism, this isotopic information is just waiting to be read. This approach – using isotopes as “spies” to tell us how their contaminant has been degraded – immediately struck me as a very powerful approach, one of the most innovative and exciting recent developments in environmental chemistry.
2. While environmental research receives support in Germany and is regarded as important by the public, environmental problems are often greatest in developing countries. To establish fruitful collaborations with researchers from those countries, I find that different cultural backgrounds and different levels of education need to be overcome. For this, I have not yet found the right channels and got to know the right people.
3. I find that our greatest challenge is the sustainable use of our natural resources – only this will allow us to accommodate the world's population of future generations. Although the focus is currently on energy, water may be an even more important and, potentially, scarcer resource in the future. I expect that every aspect related to water use will be essential to tackle this enormous challenge: research on groundwater contamination, groundwater quality (including groundwater ecology), wastewater and drinking water treatment, water reuse and innovative water use concepts.
1. Developing improved methods to assess the risk of chemicals in the environment, and in doing so find the right balance between state-of-the-art science and practicality.
2. Obtaining funding for applied research from research agencies that mostly fund fundamental research.
3. What is the optimal level of detail versus simplification in which inherently complex environmental processes/systems should be studied to provide robust, but also timely scientific evidence to support environmental policy making and risk management?
1. My motivation to do research in the field of water quality and treatment arises from the fact that this topic is both scientifically challenging and highly relevant to society and the environment. We are in a privileged position to work on pressing and interesting problems using exciting science.
2. Because environmental systems are often poorly characterized and very complex, it is difficult to formulate scientific statements that are universally valid. Moving from a single-system, single-condition approach to generally applicable scientific principles is a very challenging aspect of environmental science.
3. Our ability to create and maintain access to chemically and microbially safe water is one of the most relevant research areas in environmental sciences and engineering. Great progress has been made toward novel water treatment solutions using high-end methods. However, much more work is needed to ensure good water quality at reasonable cost, using approaches that are accessible to a larger segment of the world's population.
1. We are interested in the field of landfill management for a number of reasons. As we know, landfill is one of the most widely employed methods for the disposal of municipal solid waste around the world. Landfill solid waste generates not only greenhouse gases (CO2 and CH4) that contribute to global warming, but also landfill leachate that causes contamination in the aquatic environment. Unless immediately tackled, these environmental problems will de-rail our progress towards the UN Millennium Development Goals.
2. As the applications of nanotechnology for environmental remediation have gradually changed the world, this technology has already started to affect our lives. However, much work still needs to be conducted in developing nanomaterials universally suitable for leachate treatment. To synthesize nano-adsorbents applicable for removing refractory compounds from leachate, chemical analysis on their functional groups need to be undertaken first to assist the manipulation of their molecular structures during synthesis that would enable them to be reactive when deployed in ex-situ slurry reactors. In addition, analytical methods are relatively limited in identifying various target compounds in leachate. The complexity of leachate may reduce the possibility of identifying a number of contaminants, as overlapping peaks will become the main concern.
3. Safe and clean water is a key strategic resource and asset that needs to be protected as a basis of a healthy society and a thriving economy. However, it is difficult to balance between the world's economic growth and environmental protection. As economic growth is intrinsically linked to clean and protected environment, the most important research question in environmental science is ‘how to attain a win-win goal of economic growth and natural conservation/environmental protection without sacrificing either in the battle against global water pollution.’ Both need to be tackled in concert to address an increasingly globalized economy. To achieve a sustainable green economy in the long-term, environmental protection should not be regarded as an obstacle, but as a tangible contribution to facilitate economic development.
1. Perfluorinated acids are the most environmentally persistent chemicals I know of, and they seem to break all the traditional rules of environmental chemistry. Since they are also among the most prominent contaminants in humans and wildlife, understanding where they come from, where they go, where they end up, or what toxicological effect(s) they might have, are all highly relevant topics… even my Mom thinks it's interesting!
2. My greatest difficulties are not so much in the “doing” of the science, but rather in the translation of the results to real world influence. As an environmental chemist it is most rewarding when your data influences public policy, but more often than not the science will take a back seat to economics, domestic politics, or international diplomatic negotiations. Keeping these external pressures in mind is difficult when communicating the science, but by ignoring them we may risk having the science thrown off the bus entirely. Maybe the back seat ain't so bad.
3. Most environmental chemists are guilty of tackling one chemical, or one chemical class, at a time. This is the natural tendency because chemicals are also regulated in this way. However, human and wildlife exposure occurs to a complex mixture of contaminants at the same time. I give a lecture every year in the area of developmental toxicology, and having recently become a father I must say I think often about how the real-world chemical soup might have adverse effects on the delicate process of human development. Even though the effects might be subtle, they will likely be irreversible and could take a generation to overcome.
1. My interest is to find the emerging contaminants which are persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic in the environment. I would like to provide important environmental issues of emerging pollutants, such as the status of contamination, geographical distribution, temporal trend, and source identification in order to control and manage these compounds.
2. Sample collection. In order to understand the bioaccumulation profiles of emerging chemicals, I have collected many species of marine organisms, such as bivalves, crustaceans, fish, birds and mammals. Most of the difficulties in sampling are in collecting marine mammals because these animals cannot be collected easily. Therefore, it is very important to keep good relationships with domestic fisherman and government officers in order to be informed to be notified of accidental catches by fishing nets of marine mammals.
3. Unfortunately, I have no clear answer for this question now. I would like to find the answer to this question in my future research.
1. Ecological risk assessment has to be based on scientific knowledge. To a great extent knowledge gaps exist in assessment and extrapolation of effects measured on the individual level to populations and communities. This is due to the complexity emerging from interactions of individuals and populations and how this complexity with several feedback loops changes the behavior of biological systems under chemical stress. Complex models, especially individually-based population models, reflect this complexity and make it possible to detect what patterns emerge directly from the interactions of the individuals. For these questions toxicants with different mechanisms of action provide a great opportunity to investigate the relevance of different kinds of effects on the population level. As a final outcome a tool is provided to forecast effects of chemical stressors on populations and communities.
2. Environmental science has been split up into several disciplines, which now coexist mainly side by side. But multidisciplinarity is essential to capture the most relevant questions in environmental science. Currently multidisciplinarity is hindered by separation of the scientific communities, differences in terminology and also still by limited funding opportunities in this field.
3. In my opinion the challenge in environmental science is to understand how several multiple stressors (e.g. pesticides, endocrine disruptors, changing environmental conditions, for example due to climate change or land use) together will affect populations and ecosystems in order to maintain not only the ecosystem function, but also the biodiversity of the ecosystems. Therefore it is essential to understand how effects which we measure at standardized optimal conditions on the individual level can be extrapolated to populations and communities under variable non-optimal conditions in the field.
1. The field of metal toxicology is absolutely fascinating to me. Many metals, including the trace elements, are on the one hand essential but on the other hand strongly toxic. Other metals, like arsenic, are strongly carcinogenic, however the underlying mechanisms are still not understood.
2. The combination of toxicological testing with speciation analysis to achieve an adequate risk assessment for the respective substance.
3. I am absolutely not sure about this.
1. The complexity of the chemical world: chemistry provides a basis to biology. It was the interaction between chemicals and living things in the environment that mostly attracted me.
2. I sometimes feel that we are a long way away from seeing our (subdivided) research findings reaching a final solution. Integration of multiple disciplines is very important, but I sometimes feel that there is a barrier (difference in culture) between each field of study.
3. Is it really possible to build a sustainable society in the world? Are we really sufficiently sensible and future-oriented?
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