Professional summary
Monika has over 25 years experience in studying freshwater pollution in the United Kingdom. She studied "Technischer Umweltschutz" (environmental technologies) in Berlin, Germany and has worked at UKCEH since the beginning of 1999. Since 1997, she worked on endocrine disrupters – chemicals that mimic hormones – in the environment, looking at the fate of these and other chemicals during sewage treatment and in the receiving rivers and their effects on fish.
She is responsible for the National Fish Tissue Archive, set up in 2007 to collect tissue samples from wild fish each year, for retrospective monitoring to compare past and present concentrations of compounds. Some of these samples have been analysed for various persistent organic pollutants as well as metals and microplastics.
Monika is involved in measuring microplastics in a number of environmental matrices, from very clean (tap water) to very dirty organic rich (sewage sludge) .
Another strand of her research is on the effects of chemical pollution on wildlife populations, including assessing the relative risk of different pollutants.