Professor Kristopher McNeill is a professor at ETH Zurich and chairs the Environmental Chemistry group where his research is focussed on environmental organic chemistry, with a particular emphasis on developing a molecular-level understanding of environmentally important processes. His group have current projects on the fate of emerging contaminants, natural organic matter photochemistry, the environmental chemistry of proteins, and metal-mediated defluorination reactions.
His research covers the “Source, Transport and Fate” area of our scope, and his latest article in the journal is on developing a probe to investigate the production and fate of the OH. radical in sunlit waters:
Terephthalate as a probe for photochemically generated hydroxyl radical
Sarah E. Page, William A. Arnold and Kristopher McNeill
DOI: 10.1039/C0EM00160K
We asked him what he thought would be a challenge for environmental chemists in the coming years:
“The challenge that environmental organic chemists face going into the future is that problems are moving out of our comfort zone of small, charge-neutral, hydrophobic molecules to large, polyfunctional, and/or less well-defined species. The rule book of how one approaches the environmental chemistry of things like biomacromolecules or carbon nanomaterials still needs to be written.”
View the profiles for the rest of the Editorial Board here.
