Categoria: Meet the team

Meet Akima: Detecting one in a billion

Hi, my name is Akima!

I studied meteorology at the University of Frankfurt. Back then I realized that I would love to work in the field instead of only sitting at my desk. When I was looking for options after graduation, there was an opportunity to participate in the ATTO project. I thought this was a fantastic chance to combine my background with exciting fieldwork and so I became PhD student at MPI-C in Mainz.

As you can see in the picture I have the opportunity to travel to Brazil as part of my PhD. We visit the ATTO site regularly to maintain and develop our measurement setup.

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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 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