Congratulations!Martin Ramacher successfully defended his doctoral thesis

14 December 2020

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We are proud to announce the successful disputation of our SICSS member Martin Ramacher.

His dissertation “Quantifying the impact of air pollutants on coastal urban populations – Development of a dynamic exposure model" was supervised and evaluated by Johannes Bieser, Matthias Karl, Volker Matthias, Kay-Christian Emeis, Annette Eschenbach, Markus Quante and David Grawe.

Ramacher investigated the impact of atmospheric pollutants (NO₂, PM2.5) from different sources (road traffic, shipping, and others) on urban population exposure in North European harbor cities. Based on identified shortcomings in established methods to derive urban population exposure, Ramacher developed a new model to account for population dynamics in urban population exposure studies. This newly developed approach was compared to established methods by applying it to the port cities Hamburg, Gothenburg, Rostock, Riga and Gdansk-Gdynia under combined usage of a newly co-developed city-scale Chemistry Transport Model. The results show substantial contributions of road traffic and shipping in all cities under investigation and an underestimation of modelled exposure, when applying established methods in population exposure, which finally indicates underestimations in existing estimates of health-effects connected to urban air pollution.

Martin was a member of Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht, Institut für Kustenförschung, Abteilung Chemietransportmodellierung

Martin's future plans?
He will continue working at HZG, because he received funding for establishing and leading a new research group on the topic of modelling sources, transport and fate of emerging pollutants (POPs) in different compartments, including the modelling of different pathways of human exposure.