Anna Sobek Professor
Contact
Name and title: Anna SobekProfessor
ORCID0000-0002-1549-7449 Länk till annan webbplats.
Visiting address Room S512Svante Arrheniusväg 8 C, Geohuset
Postal address Institutionen för miljövetenskap106 91 Stockholm
About me
Professor in environmental chemistry, Department of Environmental Science
Head of Department
I studied biology and chemistry at Uppsala University and came to Stockholm University and the Institute of Applied Environmental Research (ITM) in 2000 to do my PhD on PCB uptake at the base of the aquatic food web. Thereafter I received a Marie Curie grant to do a postdoc on sorption of herbicides to black carbon at the Swiss Centre of Excellence for Agricultural Research, Zürich, Switzerland (2006-2009).
After my postdoc, I wanted to make more practical use of the knowledge on environmental problems I had gathered over the years and therefore decided to leave academia. For some years I worked as an environmental manager at a regional authority in Sweden. Although meaningful, I missed research and when the opportunity to apply for a 4-year researcher position at my former department appeared in 2010, I applied, and in 2011 I came back to Stockholm University. Since 2018 I have a permanent position at the Department of Environmental Science. I was promoted to professor in 2020.
I teach in the following courses:
- Environment and Health (MI007), the introductory course to our master's program in Environment and Health Protection.
- Large Scale Challenges to Climate and Environment (MI7014).
- Risk assessment and regulation of Chemicals (MI8022).
- Environmental Biogeochemistry (MI8017)
- Climate, Environment, and Energy - a Transdisciplinary Perspective (MI7030)
I supervise students on projects about organic contaminants.
My research is about organic contaminants. I am interested in how contaminants distribute in the environment, with emphasis on the aquatic environment, and how processes in the environment affect where contaminants end up and what risk they pose to organisms and ecosystems. Much of my research therefore bridges between environmental chemistry, ecotoxicology and biogeochemistry, and sometimes even environmental law and social sciences. I am interested in the organic carbon cycle and how it contributes to determine environmental fate and risk of hydrophobic organic contaminants. A recent example of this is the work we did to study how the origin of organic matter in Baltic Sea sediment affects the sediment sorption capacity of PCBs and PAHs, and thereby also the release of these chemicals to the water column.
In my research group we currently have several projects to study the effects of organic contaminant mixtures on various aquatic organisms by using passive dosing and the chemical activity concept.
We have projects to study processes that affect the release of contaminants from sediment to water and how to use passive samplers for improved risk assessment of contaminated sediments. In a collaborative project with researchers on hadal systems, we study the occurrence of organic contaminants in hadal trenches (the deepest parts of the global ocean). Here we are particularly interested in how degradation of organic matter in the trench affects storage of contaminants in these extreme places.
In our research we combine theory and methods from various disciplines. We work in the field, perform experiments in the lab, develop methods for chemical analysis and use literature surveys and apply models.