Rate My Professor Anna Sobek

Anna Sobek is Professor in environmental chemistry and Head of the Department of Environmental Science at Stockholm University. She studied biology and chemistry at Uppsala University and joined Stockholm University in 2000 to pursue her PhD on PCB uptake at the base of the aquatic food web at the Institute of Applied Environmental Research (ITM), completing it in 2006. She then received a Marie Curie postdoctoral grant for research on the sorption of herbicides to black carbon at the Swiss Centre of Excellence for Agricultural Research in Zürich, Switzerland, from 2006 to 2009. After her postdoc, she worked as an environmental manager at a regional authority in Sweden. In 2011, she returned to Stockholm University as a four-year researcher, obtained a permanent position at the Department of Environmental Science in 2018, and was promoted to professor in 2020. She has served as Deputy Head of Department since 2019 and became Head of Department on 1 January 2023.

Sobek's research centers on organic contaminants and their distribution in the environment, with a focus on aquatic systems. She examines processes affecting contaminant fate and risks to organisms and ecosystems, bridging environmental chemistry, ecotoxicology, biogeochemistry, and occasionally environmental law and social sciences. Specific interests include the organic carbon cycle's role in determining the fate and risk of hydrophobic organic contaminants, such as how the origin of organic matter in Baltic Sea sediments influences sorption capacity of PCBs and PAHs; effects of organic contaminant mixtures on aquatic organisms using passive dosing and the chemical activity concept; processes governing release of contaminants from sediments to water and the use of passive samplers for risk assessment of contaminated sediments; and the occurrence of organic contaminants in hadal trenches, including how organic matter degradation affects their storage. She teaches courses such as Environment and Health, Large Scale Challenges to Climate and Environment, Risk Assessment and Regulation of Chemicals, Environmental Biogeochemistry, and Climate, Environment, and Energy. Sobek also supervises student projects on organic contaminants.