Scientific representation

Thorsten Hoffmann is Professor of Analytical Chemistry at the Johannes Gutenberg-University of Mainz, Germany, since 2003. Before he had a stand-in Professorship at the University of Leipzig and was coordinator of the research areas 'Analytical Methods in the Life Sciences' and 'Atmospheric Trace Constituents' at the Leibniz-Institute for Analytical Sciences – ISAS in Dortmund. Between October 1994 and October 1995 he hold a postdoc position at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech, Pasadena, USA) in the group of John H. Seinfeld. Up to now, he advised more than 40 diploma/master students and more than 40 Ph.D. students. He is author/co-author of more than 180 peer reviewed scientific papers with a total number of citations of > 17.000 and a resulting h-index of 57. His main research activities are the design and development of tailored methods to chemically characterize biological and environmental matrixes. The motivation is a better understanding of biosphere-atmosphere interactions, e.g. by the investigation of the sources, formation pathways and chemical transformation of biogenic aerosol particles, or the development of trace analytical techniques to investigate climate archives (ice cores, speleothems). Most of the analytical research is focussed on organic analytes in combination with mass spectrometry (GC/MS, LC/MS) with a certain emphasis on the development of real-time methods for atmospheric aerosol characterization (aerosol mass spectrometry).