Dr Holger Koch

Dr. rer. nat. Holger M. Koch has actively been involved in conducting exposure and risk assessments of chemicals through both ambient and human monitoring for the past 25 years. He received his doctorate in occupational toxicology in 2006 from the University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, with a dissertation on human metabolism, human-biomonitoring and exposure/risk assessment of the plasticizer DEHP (Di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate). Prior to this, he graduated as a Certified Food Chemist at the Bavarian Health and Food Safety Authority, Erlangen, Germany, in 1999, after a year at the NYS Department of Health (Wadsworth Center, Albany) and the State University of New York at Albany (SUNY) in 1996/97.

Since 2006, Dr. Koch has been Head of the Human-Biomonitoring Laboratories at the Institute for Prevention and Occupational Medicine (IPA) - Institute of the University Bochum, Germany. Together with his active research group and in numerous national and international collaborations, he has already authored over 200 peer-reviewed publications on the exposure and risk assessment of occupational and environmental chemicals such as plasticizers, bisphenols, parabens, UV filters and pesticides. The specialty of his research group is the study of human metabolism and excretion of novel chemicals, the identification of appropriate exposure biomarkers and the development of sensitive analytical methods to measure these biomarkers in both occupational and general population studies. He has actively been involved in renowned projects such as the German National Surveys (GerES), the German Environmental Specimen Bank (ESB), the European Human Biomonitoring Initiative (HBM4EU). He is also supporting the Asian Biospecimen Collection (ABC) recently started at SNU, Seoul.

Since 2010 Dr. Koch has been member of the Human Biomonitoring Commission of the German Environment Agency (UBA), chairing it since 2024. From 2010-15 he was member of the Chronic Hazard Advisory Panel on Phthalates (CHAP) of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). Since 2017, Dr. Koch is co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health (IJHEH) and in the Editorial Board of Environment International.

His personal repositories can be found here: Web of Science/Publons | Scopus | PubMed | ResearchGate