Sensitive analytical methods

Pillar Leader: Jes Vollertsen, University of Aalborg

Jes Vollertsen is Professor of Environmental Engineering at Aalborg University, Denmark. His background is biological and chemical processes and pollutants in urban technical waters. He and his microplastics research group focus on analytical methods for quantification with the goal to contribute to trustworthy, fast, and affordable methods to quantify microplastics in the environment. The work targets all types of matrixes, e.g. water, wastewater, sludge, biosolids, sediments, soil, biota, food, air, etcetera. His goal is to quantify sources and occurrence of environmental microplastics and address the processes behind mitigation technologies. He addresses aspects of the physical, chemical, and biological breakdown of microplastics in the environment.

Alessio Gomiero, NORCE

Alessio Gomiero - is a Senior Researcher at NORCE and honorary associate researcher at CNR -IRBIM. His background is analytical chemistry, ecotoxicology, and environmental risk assessment. Since 2013, he has moved from the development of combined ecological-ecotoxicological and chemical oriented approaches assessing the oil and gas industry to the study of plastic pollution. He has contributed to the development of vibrational spectroscopy and thermo-analytical oriented analytical methods to characterize microplastics in terrestrial, freshwater and marine environments as well as investigating the biological effects of microplastics on different model organisms. He is involved in several national and international research projects related to microplastic and is a member of expert groups in relation to marine pollution and plastic litter. He acts as NAMC scientific coordinator supporting the development of the Centre.

Alvise Vianello, University of Aalborg

Alvise Vianello is Associate Professor at Aalborg University, Denmark. His background is analytical chemistry, and he worked from 2010 to 2016 at CNR-IDPA, conducting environmental monitoring, forensic, and archaeological analysis. Since 2012 he focuses his works on microplastic pollution. He participated in several monitoring surveys in the Northern Adriatic Sea, and in the Lagoon of Venice (Italy). Since 2016 he is working at Aalborg University, where he also obtained his PhD, focusing on analytical methods development and Microplastic analysis of different environmental matrices by FPA-µFTIR-Imaging and Py-GCMS. His research focus ranges from marine and freshwaters, sediments, soil, and recently it expanded also to microplastic contamination in indoor air. He also participated in several research cruises both in Danish and international waters (Greenland), collecting MPs samples from the water column and sediments with different sampling techniques.

Andy Booth, Sintef

Dr Andy Booth is Research Manager of the Ocean Observation and Ecosystem group in the Climate and Environment Department at SINTEF Ocean, Norway. His research work focuses on the characterisation and environmental fate and effects of anthropogenic pollutants in natural systems, with a focus on emerging pollutants, nanomaterials and microplastics. He has participated in many national and international level research projects related to microplastic, including coordination of the EU JPI Oceans project 'PLASTOX' and the Norwegian Research Council-funded projects 'MICROFIBRE' and 'REVEAL'.

Francesca Modugno, University of Pisa

PhD, Full Professor in Analytical Chemistry at the Department of Chemistry and Industrial Chemistry of University of Pisa. Since 2001 she carries out her research in the field of analytical chemistry applied to conservation science and environmental science. She teaches instrumental analytical chemistry and chemometrics. Her research activity deals with the development and the application of analytical methods based on analytical pyrolysis, chromatography and mass spectrometry to the characterisation and the study of the degradation of organic natural and synthetic materials. In the field of environmental chemistry she is interested into the analytical aspects related to monitoring, ecotoxicological, and degradation studies on microplastics, microfibers, and TWRPs. In the last years she has been working at developing and applying methods for the qualitative and quantitative determination of microplastics and microfibers using analytical pyrolysis coupled with gas chromatography and mass spectrometry.

Marco Mattonai, University of Pisa

Marco obtained his PhD in Chemistry and Materials Science at the University of Pisa in 2019 with a thesis on "Advanced analytical pyrolysis in the field of biomass". After his PhD, he was an employee at the R&D division of Frontier Laboratories in Japan, where he started working on the development of qualitative and quantitative Py-GC-MS methods for the analysis of microplastics in environmental samples. In 2020 Marco resumed his academic career, and is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Pisa. Marco's research activity deals with the development of analytical methods based on pyrolysis, chromatography, and mass spectrometry for the characterization of natural and synthetic materials. The main application fields of his research are biomass and sustainable chemistry, environmental analysis, and cultural heritage. In NAMC he is working on the development of analytical strategies to improve instrumental sensitivity in environmental analysis of microplastics.

Gunnar Gerdts, Alfred Wegener Institute

Gunnar Gerdts is the head of the Marine Microbiological Ecology - Microplastics group of the section Shelf Seas Systems Ecology at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research. He has been working for several years on the occurrence of microplastics in several environmental compartments (e.g. water, sediments, biota, sea ice, snow) in different geographical areas (e.g. North Atlantic, Arctic, Antarctica) by using advanced spectroscopic techniques (e.g. FTIR Imaging, nanoFTIR, Raman microscopy).

Sebastian Primpke, Alfred Wegener Institute

Sebastian Primpke is postdoctoral researcher working in the Marine Microbiological Ecology - Microplastics group of the section Shelf Seas Systems Ecology at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research. Prior to moving into the field of environmental sciences, he studied polymer chemistry with a focus on the polymerization kinetics and chemical reaction modelling. The main focus of his current research is the development, harmonization, and evaluation of analytical methods for the identification and quantification of micro- and nanoplastics within most types of environmental matrices.

Anna Michel, WHOI

Laura Simon Sánchez, Aalborg University

Laura is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of the Built Environment at Aalborg University (BUILD-AAU), Denmark. During her PhD at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) of Barcelona, she investigated the occurrence, methods, and fate of microplastics in transitional systems of the Mediterranean Sea. Laura’s research at the Urban Pollution Group (BUILD-AAU) continues to centre on the challenges of plastic pollution, looking at developing analytical methods to detect and characterize nanoplastics in the natural environment. Laura was awarded as National Geographic Explorer 2022 with the project Sinking at Sea to investigate the exports of microplastics from the sea surface to the seafloor.

Jacopo La Nasa, University of Pisa

Born in 1987, he graduated cum laude in Analytical Chemistry in 2011 and obtained his PhD in Chemical Sciences in 2015. From 2015 to 2022, he served as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Chemistry and Industrial Chemistry at the University of Pisa. From 2022 to 2024, he held a position as a Fixed-term Researcher. Since May 2024, he has been a tenure-track researcher at the same department. His teaching activities involve courses related to the disciplinary field of Analytical Chemistry for both undergraduate and master’s degree programs in chemistry. Dr. Jacopo La Nasa has extensive experience in analytical chemistry applied to environmental and heritage sciences. His research focuses on the development of advanced analytical methods, including analytical pyrolysis, gas and liquid chromatography, and mass spectrometry. He specializes in the development of microwave-assisted sample pretreatment approaches for the purification of environmental samples for the analysis of microplastics and organic contaminants. A significant part of his work involves the study of the aging behavior of microplastics and the release of potentially harmful low-molecular-weight compounds into the environment. In 2024, he was listed among the "World's Top 2%" scientists by Stanford University in the field of chemistry, specifically in the subfield of analytical chemistry.

Dorte Herzke, NILU

Senior researcher at NILU’s Environmental Chemistry department at the Fram Centre, Tromsø and Prof II at UiT, has been working with microplastics (MP) related research questions for more than a decade. Her research focus is on the development of methodologies for sampling MP in air and determination of MP in a variety of matrices, as well as investigating the role of MP as a vector for chemicals, including additives. Dr. Herzke also leads the INTPART project PlastPoll as well as the SIS CleanArctic. She participates in the NORRUS collaboration MALINOR on mapping marine litter in the Arctic, in addition to several smaller projects on plastic pollution funded by the FRAM Centre.

Greta Biale, University of Pisa

Greta Biale is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Chemistry and Industrial Chemistry of the University of Pisa. She earned her PhD in Chemistry and Material Science from the same university in 2025 with a dissertation titled “Study of the fate and interactions of microplastics and nanoplastics in the environment”. During her PhD, Greta focused on developing and optimizing protocols based on analytical pyrolysis for the analysis and characterization of microplastics (MPs), their low-molecular degradation products, and MPs-associated organic contaminants. A significant part of her research involved refining methods to characterize chemicals released into water by MPs as a consequence of aging, and the optimization of microwave-assisted pretreatments for the quantification of different contaminants, in various environmental matrices.