Lenny Winkel

Lenny Winkel’s group studies the environmental behavior of selenium and other health-impacting trace elements such as arsenic.

Currently, her research consists of two interdisciplinary work programs that are focused on studying sources, pathways and sinks of natural selenium species.

The first work program is aimed at studying the production of volatile selenium species by marine phytoplankton. Her research methods include microcosm studies and the characterization of produced volatile selenium species. The results expected will help improve our understanding of the role of marine phytoplankton in the global selenium cycle.

The deposition of atmospherically transported selenium on the continent is the main focus of the second work program. By performing sampling and trace element analyses on environmental archives, she is investigating whether atmospherically transported selenium could be a source of selenium in the terrestrial environment. The results expected will advance our understanding of atmospheric selenium deposition and provide an insight in the role climate plays in the continental abundance of selenium.

Lenny Winkel has been an associate Professor of Inorganic Environmental Geochemistry at the Department of Environmental Systems Science since 2018.

She was born in Leidschendam, Netherlands, in 1975.

She completed a Master’s in geology at Utrecht University, Netherlands, in 2000 and obtained a PhD from ETH Zurich (Earth Science Department) in 2006.

From 2006 to 2008 Lenny Winkel worked as a postdoc at Eawag (Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology), where she was involved in the development of prediction models for natural arsenic pollution in groundwater in Southeast Asia. This project and the two associated publications she was first author on received extensive international press coverage.

From 2008 to 2011 she was an experienced researcher in the European Marie-Curie network AquaTRAIN. Within the context of this network, she worked at the universities of Grenoble, France, Aberdeen, UK and Crete, Greece. She also acted as an AquaTRAIN subproject leader, researcher representative and mentor for early stage researchers. In 2011, she was awarded a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Professorship for her project investigating the global biogeochemical cycle of selenium. Lenny Winkel joined ETH Zurich and Eawag in 2011 as a SNSF-funded non-tenure-track assistant professor. In 2013 this position was converted to tenure-track and in March 2018 Prof. Winkel received tenure.