Lenny Winkel, ETH Zürich, Switzerland
2022 Science Innovation Award medallist
Lenny Winkel is an associate professor of Inorganic Environmental Geochemistry at ETH Zürich and Eawag, the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology. Lenny did her undergraduate studies in Geology at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and completed her PhD on the thermal decomposition of copper sulfides in the Solar Technology Laboratory at Paul Scherrer Institute and ETH Zurich, under the supervision of Terry Seward. She subsequently did a postdoc project at Eawag with Michael Berg, Annette Johnson and Stephan Hug predicting large-scale groundwater contamination of the harmful element arsenic using geospatial modelling approaches. Their work on geogenic contamination of groundwater was extensively covered by international press and in 2019 awarded with the Swiss Chemical Society (SCG) Sandmeyer award.
After further postdoctoral research in France, the UK and Greece in the framework of the EU-funded project AquaTRAIN aimed at studying the behaviour and environmental impact of geogenic elements, Lenny was awarded a Swiss National Science Foundation Professorship in 2011 for her project on the global biogeochemical cycle of the trace element selenium. This research resulted in key insights into the biogeochemical selenium cycle. Lenny and her research group demonstrated that atmospheric deposition plays a key role in the terrestrial distribution of selenium. Furthermore, she developed and used innovative methods to measure fluxes of gaseous selenium and discovered that gaseous emissions of selenium are important pathways that could lead to environmental redistribution of selenium. Her further research projects involve multi-scale investigations of trace element behavior in and across various environmental compartments, including marine waters, the atmosphere and soils using experimental, analytical and modeling approaches.
Lenny’s research is internationally recognized, as evidenced by publications in top-ranked scientific disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals as well as invitations for plenary and keynote talks to internationally renowned conferences. Based on her outstanding research contributions to geochemistry and the ability to clearly communicate these contributions to a broad audience, she was selected as the EAG Distinguished Lecturer in 2017.
Apart from her research, Lenny is also a dedicated advisor and teacher, and two of her former PhD students recently received the ETH Medal for an outstanding doctoral thesis. In 2019, Lenny won the Goldene Eule (Golden Owl) Award for exceptional and excellent teaching at ETH Zürich and she was appointed as a didactic fellow at ETH in the same year.
Additional information and a list of publications can be found here.