Project group
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Tea Zuliani
Tea is a research associate at the Department of Environmental Sciences at the Jožef Stefan Institute. She is the head of the chemical section of the Ecological Laboratory with a Mobile Unit. Her work focuses on inorganic analytical chemistry in environmental and biological systems. She started her research career by developing analytical methods to detect organotin compounds in terrestrial environments, Cr speciation in agricultural soils and food products, as well as Zn in human milk and Ni in cocoa and tea. Using advanced techniques that combine GC, LC, and laser ablation with different ICP-MS systems (ICP-QMS and ICP-MS/MS), she has tracked the transformation of chemical elements during both analytical procedures and environmental cycling, often employing enriched stable isotopes for greater accuracy. In recent years, her focus has expanded to developing analytical procedures for determining stable isotope ratios of non-traditional elements (Mg, Cu, Mo, Sr, Cd, Pb by MC-ICP-MS) and their applications in environmental, provenance, geological, medical, and archaeology studies. Throughout her career, she has contributed to several projects exploring the biogeochemical cycling of trace elements and their isotopes in various river systems.
Dr. Tjaša Kanduč
Tjaša is a senior researcher at the Jožef Stefan Institute, Department of Environmental Sciences. With over 20 years of experience, she has worked on various research topics, including the study of past and present impacts of stable isotope applications in environmental matrices, focusing on carbon cycling, aquatic geochemistry, coal geology, and more. She is also involved in several monitoring studies in Slovenia, as well as national and international research projects. Her participation in DISCOVER is focused on WP3, WP4 and WP6 activities.
Prof. Dr. Sonja Lojen
Sonja, holds a PhD in geology, is a research counsellor at the Department of Environmental Sciences at Jožef Stefan Institute, and is the Head of the Isotope Biogeochemistry group. She has 30 years of expertise in isotope geochemistry of light elements and application of stable isotopes in hydrogeology and isotope ecology in terrestrial settings. She has been involved in or coordinated several national and international research projects dealing with carbon and nitrogen cycling in rivers at local and regional scales, element partition and their isotope fractionation during authigenic carbonate precipitation, paleoenvironmental reconstruction based on elemental and isotope proxies in carbonate archives, and isotope ecology. Her participation in DISCOVER is focused on WP3, WP4 and WP6 activities.
prof. dr. Radmila Milačič Ščančar
Radmila is a research counsellor at the Department of Environmental Sciences at Jožef Stefan Institute, and is the Head of Laboratory for analytical chemistry. Her research focuses on investigating the role of metal ions and metal-based nanoparticles in the environment and living organisms using chemical speciation, nanoparticle sizing, and bio-imaging of elements in biological tissues. She develops analytical methods for element speciation in environmental and biological samples using chemical speciation techniques and liquid or gas chromatography hyphenated to ICP-MS. She studies the transformation of metal species during analytical procedures and their fate in the environment and living organisms using stable isotopic tracers. Quantification of chemical species of elements is performed by speciated isotope dilution (ID)-ICP-MS. She also explores the partitioning of selected elements in terrestrial and aquatic environments. Her participation in DISCOVER is focused on WP5 and WP6 activities.
Prof. Dr. Janez Ščančar
He holds the position of full professor at the Jožef Stefan International Postgraduate School and serves as Head of the Research Group for Trace Elements Speciation within the Department of Environmental Sciences at the Jožef Stefan Institute. His research focuses on the role of trace elements speciation in the environment and living organisms. Throughout his career, he has actively participated in several national and international interdisciplinary projects on river systems across Europe. His participation in DISCOVER is focused on WP5 and WP6 activities.
Assistenzprofessorin Dr. Janja Vidmar
Janja received her PhD in Ecotechnology in 2017 from the Jožef Stefan International Postgraduate School and is currently a research associate at the Department of Environmental Sciences at the Jožef Stefan Institute. With over 10 years of experience in inorganic analytical chemistry, her work primarily focuses on analyzing inorganic nanoparticles in environmental, biological, and food systems, with a strong emphasis on single-particle spICP-MS. Recently, she has expanded her research to studying small microplastics and nanoplastics in natural systems using spICP-MS and other complementary techniques. Her participation in DISCOVER is focused on WP2, WP3, WP4, WP5 and WP6 activities.
Dr. Polona Vreča
Polona is a senior researcher at Jožef Stefan Institute, Department of Environmental Sciences. She has more than 25 years of experience in the field of geochemistry. Her expertise comprises use of stable isotopes of C, N, O and H as tracers of environmental changes, geochemical investigations of soils and sediments and evaluation of their contamination. Her current research focusses on use of H and O isotopes of water molecule in investigations of water cycle with emphasize on precipitation – surface water – groundwater interactions, glacier and ice cave deposit as well as tap water investigations. She is engaged in the development of the isotope monitoring networks and collection of water isotope data that are shared through different research platforms (e.g., SLONIP – Slovenian Network of Isotopes in Precipitation, https://slonip.ijs.si/ or WATSON – European water stable isotope data collections, https://watson-cost.eu/outputs/databases/water_data/). Her participation in DISCOVER is focused on WP3, WP4 and WP6 activities.
Tjaša Žerdoner, MSc
Tjaša is a PhD student at the Department of Environmental Sciences at Jožef Stefan Institute. Her research work is in the field of inorganic analytical chemistry, with the main focus on the application of the ICP-MS method for the quantification of potentially toxic elements and on the application of the multicollector ICP-MS method for the determination of isotope ratios of elements (such as Pb, Sr, Cd) in different environmental and biological samples.
Project group
assoz.Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr.nat.techn. Johanna Irrgeher
With nearly 20 years of experience in environmental analysis. Her research group on isotope ratio analysis focuses on developing methods for elemental and isotope ratio mass spectrometry in various fields of application. She has experience in sampling on land and in water and has been involved in large sampling campaigns in fresh and salt water. Her expertise includes sampling, sample preparation, method development for trace element and isotope analysis, measurements, data reduction, statistical data analysis and uncertainty propagation. JI has experience in handling large data sets, elemental analyses (ICP-QMS, ICP-SFMS, ICP-MS/MS) and isotope analysis methods (e.g. B, S, Sr, Mo, Zn, Ti, Mo, Gd, Pb, Nd and U isotopes based on MC ICP-MS) and chemical imaging with (LA)-ICP-MS as well as coupled techniques (prepFAST-MC, seaFAST) for the analysis of metals and rare earth metals in low concentrations. JI has been involved in various transdisciplinary research projects and has supervised more than 40 students at all levels. Johanna is currently chair of the IUPAC Commission on Isotopic Abundances and Atomic Weights (ciaaw.org), making her the first woman in the commission's history since 1899 to hold this position.
Dr. Donata Bandoniene
She is a senior scientist at the Chair of General and Analytical Chemistry at MUL. After completing her master's degree in Lithuania, she earned her doctorate in technical chemistry at the Institute of Food Chemistry and Technology at Graz University of Technology, Austria. At MUL, she has long been involved in research projects on determining the geographical origin of food, agricultural and forestry products, and geological samples (natural graphite) using elemental fingerprinting (ICP-MS, LA-ICP-MS). Her areas of expertise and research focus include sample preparation, in particular the application and optimisation of digestion methods (classical microwave digestion, microwave-assisted oxygen combustion, MIC, high-pressure ashing, HPA) for trace element analysis using ICP-MS, as well as the development, validation and application of chromatographic separation methods (HPLC, IC, IC-ICP-MS).
Univ.-Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr.techn. Thomas Prohaska
He has been a full professor and head of the Chair of General and Analytical Chemistry at MUL since October 2018. With over 180 relevant publications, he is a leading researcher in the field of elemental and isotope analysis. He will support DISCOVER with his expertise in analytical chemistry, river sampling (Danube (Austria), Eg (Mongolia)), Amazon (Brazil) and the latest developments in passive sampling (FWF project P30085).
Matthias Rittberger
Matthias is studying Responsible Consumption and Production at Montanuniversität Leoben. As part of his bachelor’s thesis, supervised by Donata Bandoniene, he is working with various analytical separation techniques. The aim of his research is to develop methods for the routine analysis of anions in river water, with a particular focus on arsenic species using ion chromatography.
Antonia Siebenbrunner
Antonia is studying Industrial Environmental Protection and Process Engineering at MUL. Antonia completed her bachelor's thesis with the Murmap project (www.murmap.at) on the development of passive sampling techniques for analysing trace metals in freshwater systems. She is currently finalising her master's project, which deals with the further development of the Diffusive Gradients in Thin Film (DGT) technique, which she carried out in Brazil in the Amazon basin. She was supervised by Johanna Irrgeher and Stefan Wagner. Her expertise in sampling, sample analysis and mass spectrometry will be of great benefit to DISCOVER.
Dr.nat.techn. MSc Stefan Wagner
He is a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of General and Analytical Chemistry at MUL. He received his doctorate in environmental analytical chemistry from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna (BOKU) in 2022. His research focuses on the development, validation and application of selective passive sampling techniques based on diffusion gradients in thin films (DGT) for the visualisation, speciation and isotope analysis of (trace) elements in transdisciplinary scientific fields using highly sensitive mass spectrometric (ICP-QMS, ICP-SFMS, MC-ICP-MS, LA-ICP-MS) and spectroscopic methods (planar optodes, synchrotron XFM). As part of DISCOVER, he will develop new bonding layers for As and Sb for passive sampling using DGT in order to track multi-element and isotope signatures in situ.