The University of Leeds

Faculty Member, Earth and Environment

Professor in Experimental Biogeochemistry

About

Biography

I am a Professor in Experimental Biogeochemistry and my research area is linked to the quantitative elucidation of (bio)geochemical reaction mechanisms at low to hydrothermal temperatures in inorganic and biologic systems. My group focuses on problems related to the speciation, transport, release, and sequestration of a series of elements in Earth surface environments as well as on processes linked to metal and nutrient cycling in microbial systems.

We apply a variety of experimental (and some field) approaches to study thermodynamic and kinetic processes involving silicates, carbonates, oxides and sulphides (e.g., nucleation, growth and crystallization kinetics of silica, iron oxides, carbonates, metal sulphides, fungal weathering of silicates, biomineralization in soils and geothermal and cryogenic areas, mineral -metal-organic/bacterial interactions on surfaces).

Experimental approaches include low temperature to hydrothermal autoclaves and reactors, conventional and high-resolution micro-spectroscopy, Infrared spectroscopy, light scattering (DLS), Vertical Scanning Interferometry (VSI) as well as metagenomic techniques that help elucidate the microbial community diversity and function in various mixed mineral-biofilm systems, in stressed culture environments or in natural field samples from geothermal or cryogenic extreme environments.

A large part of our work is focused on the use of synchrotron-based techniques to elucidate molecular level reaction mechanisms via the development and application of in situ and realtime techniques to quantify processes as they occur (e.g., SAXS/WAXS, hard and soft-XAS) or use mapping and quantification of functional group distributions (µ-FTIR and STXM) to elucidate fungal and bacterial biochemical signals.

Field-work in the last few years included geothermal extreme environments in Iceland and New Zealand and cryogenic extreme environments (cold deserts) in the Norwegian Arctic.

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