Foreign professor works for cleaner world

For Thorjorn Larssen, protecting the environment is more than just a cause. It is his job.

As chief researcher of the foreign team of the international environmental program SINOMER, Larssen is engaged in finding solutions to the world's pressing ecological problems.

Larssen is a research manager at an international institute for water research, NIVA for short, and he is the head of the section for freshwater environmental contaminants.

He is also a professor of environmental chemistry at a renowned university, a senior visiting professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Geochemistry and a former visiting professor at Tsinghua University.

Drawing on years of experience coordinating large, integrated projects, he is directing NIVA's Strategic Institute Initiative on Emerging Contaminants.

China is not a new land to the renowned scientist. He has been working as a project manager and principal scientist in China for several years, during which he worked in different environmental fields, including water management, environmental contaminants and acid rain.

Larssen is an environmental chemist with broad research interests, a wide project portfolio and more than 50 papers published in international scientific journals covering such topics as environmental chemistry, biogeochemistry, environmental monitoring and environmental health.

He conducts applied environmental research, including interactions between the natural environment and pressures from human activities, behavioral pollutants in the natural environment and chemical interactions between different environmental media.

His early published work was related to biogeochemistry of main elements, especially acid rain and its impacts, using a range of methods, including simulation models, monitoring and survey data analyses, field work and laboratory experiments.

He has most recently been researching mercury contamination. This involves several approaches, such as mercury catchment cycling, transformation processes, models for policy support, human exposure assessments and broad, integrated cooperation on mercury in China.

His newest fields of interest are organic micro pollutants, as well as their effects on the ecosystem and human health and links between climate change and impacts of contaminants. In 2011, he began leading NIVA's Strategic Institute Initiative on Emerging Contaminants.

Larssen has wide experience in leading large research and capacity-building projects in an international context.

He has led projects with many participating institutions from a wide range of specialist fields. And through his work, he has developed an extensive network with leading scientists in several countries, especially in the United States, Canada, Sweden, the United Kingdom and China.

zhuanti@chinadaily.com.cn