Editor-in-Chief

Professor Stuart Harrad received his PhD at the University of East Anglia in 1989 during which he helped establish baseline levels of the contamination of UK soils with dioxins and PCBs. Following postdoctoral appointments at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and Lancaster University, he moved to the private sector where he managed the first UK laboratory accredited for dioxin analysis. In 1994, he took up an academic position at the University of Birmingham where he has established a substantial research group investigating many aspects of the environmental sources, fate, and behaviour of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and related chemicals, with a particular focus on human exposure assessment. Over the course of his career, Professor Harrad has made important contributions to developing our understanding of the environmental impacts of trace organic contaminants. He has led numerous international collaborative projects researching multiple topics related to POPs. Some of his wide-ranging research activities include: (1)human biomonitoring; (2)source apportionment; (3)use of sediment chronology to establish temporal trends in POPs contamination; (4)establishing the importance of the indoor environment as an arena of exposure to consumer chemicals; (5)managing the fate of POPs in the waste stream; and (6) exploiting chirality as an environmental forensics tool. He sits on the International Advisory Board of the Annual Symposium of Halogenated Persistent Pollutants, and has published approximately 200 scientific papers in high impact journals (H-index = 60, Scopus).

POPs, PFAS, PCBs, Dioxins, Exposure assessment, PAH, BFRs, Flame retardants, Organophosphate esters, PBDEs, HBCDD, Environmental forensics, Pharmaceuticals, Soil, Sediment, Water, Diet, Human biomonitoring, Waste management, E-waste, Landfill, Biomonitoring, Temporal trends