Urban Wünsch

I’m Urban Wünsch, a researcher working on organic compounds dissolved in water. My work centers on disentangling the composition of complex environmental samples to understand the fate of Dissolved Organic Matter (DOM) in water by shining a light on the key processes involved.

A simple analogy helps illustrate why this matters: a cup of black tea gets darker as its flavor intensifies — we understand that chemistry well. River water can show the same kind of color, but for very different reasons. Where do those colored substances come from, and what happens when bacteria use them as a food source?

I investigate questions such as where do DOM’s compounds originate from, why do they persist, what controls DOMs persistence, and how can we distinguish natural DOM from anthropogenic contaminants? How are enzymes involved in the degradation of DOM?

These questions sound straightforward, but the sheer number of organic compounds in a typical water sample routinely overwhelms standard analytical techniques.

I am a researcher focussed on the elucidation of the relationship between optical and chemical properties of DOM. I use analytical techniques such as:

• Fluorescence emission-excitation matrix (EEM) spectroscopy
• Absorbance spectroscopy
• High Performance Size Exclusion Chromatography (HPSEC)
• Fourier Transform Ion Cyclotron Resonance Mass Spectrometry (FT-ICR-MS)

In conjunction with these analytical techniques, I focus on the data analysis using multivariate statistical models (chemometrics) such as:

• Principal Component Analysis (PCA)
• Parallel Factor Analysis (PARAFAC & PARAFAC2)
• N-way partial least squares (N-PLS)
• Advanced Coupled Matrix and Tensor Factorization (ACMTF)