Prof Beate Escher

Beate Escher is Head of Department of Cell Toxicology at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany and Professor at the Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, Germany. She is also lecturer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in ETHZ, Switzerland, holds an honorary professorship at the University of Queensland and an adjunct professorship at Griffith University, Australia. She is an Associate Editor with Environmental Science and Technology. From 2011 to 2014 she held an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship and was Deputy Director of Entox at UQ from 2009 to 2013. In 2013 she won the Australian Water Association AWA National Research Innovation Award for her work on cell-based bioassays in water quality assessment. Beate Escher has been working on developing scientifically sound assessment tools and methodologies for risk assessment of micropollutants in the environment and in people. Escher’s expertise includes mode-of-action based effect assessment, and methods for hazard screening of organic micropollutants including pharmaceuticals, pesticides and persistent organic pollutants, environmental transformation products, and mixtures. She is interested in improving dosing and interpretation of high-throughput in vitro bioassays and runs the robotic bioassay platform CITEPro at UFZ (www.ufz.de/citepro). More practically oriented aspects include passive sampling of sediment and biota and effect-based methods for water quality assessment, covering a wide range of different water types from wastewater to drinking water and treatment processes including biological treatment, filtration and advanced oxidation processes.

Beate continues to collaborate with QAEHS on water quality assessment with in vitro bioassays. One collaborative project involves investigation of water quality in wastewater treatment plants on census day 2016 to benchmark the water quality and to quantify treatment efficacy. She is also involved in projects on the chemical body burden in marine wildlife, in particular the dioxin like effects of chemicals in blubber from dugongs and other tissue of marine wildlife.