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. These samples have already been analysed for various persistent organic pollutants such as metals and microplastics.
Monika is involved in measuring microplastics in raw and treated drinking water wastewater as well as the sludge that is produced during treatment processes.
Another strand of her research is on the effects of chemical pollution on wildlife populations, including assessing the relative risk of different pollutants. She has published on the relative risks of different chemicals to wildlife in UK freshwaters, persistent organic pollutants in the Bohai region of China (2017) and What works? Looking at upgrades to wastewater treatment in Swindon and water quality and invertebrate diversity in the receiving river over several decades (2020).