Category: Meet the team

Meet Pedro: Taking a close look at plant stomata

Pedro climbing in the Amazonian trees to collect data

Hello everyone, my name is Pedro.

I am a biologist and a lover of the world of plants. I first realized this during my undergrad. As an intern at the Institute of Botany of São Paulo, I participated in an ozone bio-monitoring project. Basically, it was all about exposing sensitive plants to this pollutant, ozone, in several locations around an oil refinery. After a few days of exposure, I looked at the leaves and checked if and to what degree they have injured due to the ozone. With long-term monitoring, our group could then also get an idea about the air quality with respect to ozone at different locations and how that changes over time.

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Meet the team

Meet Olaf: Taking care of field installations takes a village!

Olaf Kolle is responsible for field installations at ATTO.
© Martin Hertel / MPI-BGC

My name is Olaf Kolle and I am the scientific head of the Central Service Group ‘Field Experiments and Instrumentation’ at the MPI-BGC in Jena. Currently, we are 13 people in this Service Group. I myself am a meteorologist. But our group members have a wide range of backgrounds, from scientists over gardeners to engineers. This means that we have accumulated a large amount of technical and scientific expertise to plan, set up and maintain field installations.

That includes many different tasks, including designing and installing self-sufficient power supply systems and taking care of data transmission.

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Meet the team

Meet Hella: chasing methane sources

Hello everybody, my name is Hella van Asperen. I am a PostDoc at the Institute of Environmental Physics in Bremen (Germany), in the group of Prof. Notholt, but currently live and work in Manaus. I started my studies at Wageningen University in the Netherlands with the Bachelor program ‘Soil, Water, Atmosphere’. That I followed with a Masters in ‘Soil Science’ and ‘Earth System Science’. I really enjoyed the interdisciplinary aspect of those programs. It’s fascinating to me how different living and non-living parts of the ecosystem interact, e.g. plants and microbes with the atmosphere. As part of my Master’s project, I got to visit the University of California, Davis, to help set up an experiment focusing on soil CO2 fluxes.

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Meet the team

Meet Milena: What is the role of oxidation products of BVOCs?

Milena studies oxidation products of BVOCs.

Hello everybody, I am Milena Ponczek. I am a post-doc at the Laboratory of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Sao Paulo. About one year ago, I joined Prof. Artaxo’s group there.

I have a Bsc degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Campinas, Brazil. There, my first research project was to study VOC degradation process by photocatalysis on titanium dioxide. Then, I changed my research field from applied to fundamental sciences, pursuing a Ph.D. in Atmospheric Chemistry at the University of Lyon in France. My thesis focused on laboratory studies to investigate photocatalytic properties of mineral dust aerosols.

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Meet the team

Meet Ana Caroline: What’s the matter with soil water?

Ana Caroline collects soil water samples

Hi, my name is Ana Caroline, and I currently work at the ATTO Project for the INPA and the MPI-BGC. I graduated from university with a degree in Environmental Management. Afterward, I obtained a Master’s degree in Climate and Environment from INPA. At ATTO I work as a scientific assistant for the Gerd Gleixner group. I collect soil water samples to analyze some of its chemical parameters, such as pH, electrical conductivity and Dissolved Organic Carbon (DOC). For the experiment, we placed several plates in the soil to collect soil water from different depths. We collect the water in glass bottles inside a box (as pictured in the photo) the lab analysis.

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Meet the team