Staff

Kathrin Fenner

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Prof. Dr. Kathrin Fenner

Senior scientist / group leader

Department Environmental Chemistry

About Me

I am passionate about learning how chemicals degrade in the environment and whether any hazardous transformation products are formed during degradation. The ultimate goal of my research is to develop more accurate methods to assess persistence and risk from transformation product formation in regulatory risk assessment procedures. My research focuses on the following three areas in particular.

  1. Prediction of biodegradation pathways and rates
    Current (Q)SBRs tools to predict biodegradation half-lives produce highly uncertain results and available pathway prediction tools suffer from combinatorial explosion due to a lack of methods to prioritize possible pathways. In my research, I mine biotransformation pathway and rate information to develop novel algorithms for biotransformation prediction. In parallel, my team performs bioreactor experiments with pertinent microbial communities and employ high-resolution mass spectrometry to identify transformation products to use that data to further improve biotransformation prediction
  2. Hazard and risk assessment of transformation products
    The goal of this aspect of my research is to develop models and indicators to predict and assess the environmental fate of transformation products. In collaboration with the team of Prof. B. Escher (UFZ Leipzig, Universität Tübingen) we are developing methods to estimate mixture toxicity of transformation products and their parent compound, using the strong structural resemblance to the parent compounds and what is known about parent toxicity as a guiding principle.
  3. Improved tools for persistence assessment
  4. Persistence assessment is key to all chemical legislations in Europe. In my research, I try to contribute to a critical reflection of current persistence assessment paradigms and methods. For instance, I introduced the concept of joint persistence as novel persistence indicator that accounts for transformation product formation. Currently, I am also working on a project that evaluates the value of the OECD 308 guideline for evaluation of persistence of chemicals at the sediment-water interface.

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Projects

Predicting environment-specific biotransformation of chemical contaminants
In regulatory hazard and risk assessment chemical persistence is assessed through a tiered system of degradation studies.

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Curriculum Vitae

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Publications

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Bosshard, J., Fenner, K., Singer, H., Anliker, S., & Gulde, R. (2024). Abwasser aus chemisch-pharmazeutischen Synthesebetrieben. Charakterisierung der Stoffeinträge in Gewässer. Aqua & Gas, 104(3), 43-49. , Institutional Repository
Schittich, A. R., Fenner, K., Stedmon, C. A., Xu, J., McKnight, U. S., & Smets, B. F. (2024). Coupling pathway prediction and fluorescence spectroscopy to assess the impact of auxiliary substrates on micropollutant biodegradation. Environmental Microbiology, 26(2), e16560 (18 pp.). doi:10.1111/1462-2920.16560, Institutional Repository
Coll, C., Fenner, K., & Screpanti, C. (2023). Early Assessment of Biodegradability of Small Molecules to Support the Chemical Design in Agro & Pharma R&D. Chimia, 77(11), 742-749. doi:10.2533/chimia.2023.742, Institutional Repository
Escher, B. I., Altenburger, R., Blüher, M., Colbourne, J. K., Ebinghaus, R., Fantke, P., … Fenner, K. (2023). Modernizing persistence–bioaccumulation–toxicity (PBT) assessment with high throughput animal-free methods. Archives of Toxicology, 97, 1267-1283. doi:10.1007/s00204-023-03485-5, Institutional Repository
Hafner, J., Fenner, K., & Scheidegger, A. (2023). Systematic handling of environmental fate data for model development - illustrated for the case of biodegradation half-life data. Environmental Science and Technology Letters, 10(10), 859-864. doi:10.1021/acs.estlett.3c00526, Institutional Repository
Honti, M., Zsugyel, M., Seller, C., & Fenner, K. (2023). Benchmarking the persistence of active pharmaceutical ingredients in river systems. Environmental Science and Technology, 57(39), 14684-14693. doi:10.1021/acs.est.3c01627, Institutional Repository
Karakurt-Fischer, S., Johnson, D. R., Fenner, K., & Hafner, J. (2023). Making waves: Enhancing pollutant biodegradation via rational engineering of microbial consortia. Water Research, 247, 120756 (7 pp.). doi:10.1016/j.watres.2023.120756, Institutional Repository
Satoh, H., Hafner, J., Hutter, J., & Fenner, K. (2023). Can AI help improve water quality? Towards the prediction of degradation of micropollutants in wastewater. Chimia, 77(1-2), 48-55. doi:10.2533/chimia.2023.48, Institutional Repository
Seller, C., Varga, L., Börgardts, E., Vogler, B., Janssen, E., Singer, H., … Honti, M. (2023). Do biotransformation data from laboratory experiments reflect micropollutant degradation in a large river basin?. Water Research, 235, 119908 (13 pp.). doi:10.1016/j.watres.2023.119908, Institutional Repository
Tian, R., Posselt, M., Fenner, K., & McLachlan, M. S. (2023). Increasing the environmental relevance of biodegradation testing by focusing on initial biodegradation kinetics and employing low-level spiking. Environmental Science and Technology Letters, 10(1), 40-45. doi:10.1021/acs.estlett.2c00811, Institutional Repository

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Address

E-Mail: kathrin.fenner@eawag.ch
Phone: +41 58 765 5085
Fax: +41 58 765 5802
Address: Eawag
Überlandstrasse 133
8600 Dübendorf
Office: BU F18

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Expert on

biological degradation, mass spectrometry, micropollutants, organic pollutants

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Research Group

See my team page

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