Trial lecture
The candidate will first give a trial lecture on the following topic: 'Bioremediation technologies for removing organic chemicals'.
Main research findings
How do we know if chemicals will persist in the environment?
Although chemicals are essential for our modern lives and society, pollution from chemicals is also a threat to the environment and human health. A key factor for environmental concern from pollution is whether a chemical resists degradation and can thus persist in the environment. This project has identified points for improvement of the current methods used for assessing persistence:
A database (PikMe) with information on over a million chemicals was created. The information from both tests and predictions from multiple sources where combined but only 5.1% (58 213 chemicals) had reliable data for persistence assessments. In conclusion, PikMe could be improved by adding more data sources and including different prediction methods.
The second paper explored why there is so much variability in the test for biodegradation in seawater. Several factors, related to collecting and handling the seawater, affected the degradation rate of the reference chemical aniline.
Finally, a laboratory method was developed for high throughput screening of readily degradable chemicals by measuring the growth of bacteria consuming the chemicals as a surrogate for biodegradability. This method provided more insight into how the bacterial communities responded to chemicals, but it was considered not a reliable method for measuring biodegradation.
Adjudication committee
- Associate Professor Nora Sutton, Wageningen University, The Netherlands
- Assistant Professor Malte Posselt, Stockholm University, Sweden
- Professor Dirk Linke, Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo, Norway
Chair of the defense
- Professor Ketil Hylland, Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo, Norway
Supervisors
- Research Manager Adam Lillicrap, NIVA, Norway
- Research Manager Malcolm Reid, NIVA, Norway
- Senior Research Scientist Merete Grung, NIVA, Norway
- Professor, Alexander Eiler, Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo, Norway