“Fruit farmers, florists, and clockmakers”
Joop Hermens will become an ES&T associate editor.
Joop Hermens will become ES&T’s newest associate editor in January 2007. Hermens is the head of the environmental toxicology and chemistry research group at the Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences (IRAS) at the University of Utrecht (The Netherlands), and he has been a member of ES&T’s editorial advisory board since 2001.
Hermens’s “work for ES&T has been groundbreaking. Joop was the principal editor for our special issue on ecotoxicology,” published December 1, 2004, says Jerald Schnoor, the editor of ES&T, “and now we are receiving many more papers in this crucial area of environmental science.” Schnoor predicts that Hermens “will continue to lead our efforts in ecotoxicology and human health.”
To that end, Hermens says he would like to see ES&T accept more papers on multiple stresses and ecosystems effects, examined with tools such as genomics. He would also like to see the journal embrace new arenas of research, including human and environmental health.
Hermens has always been interested in mixtures. “I like a puzzle,” he says. As a student initially intrigued by both physics and chemistry, he chose chemistry. After teaching chemistry for several years, Hermens went to the University of Utrecht to complete his Ph.D. work on mixtures of aquatic pollutants. He joined the faculty there in 1983 and has since advised more than 15 graduate students, working with a team that continues to tease apart the combined effects of multiple chemicals in the environment.
In 2004, Hermens won the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry’s Environmental Education Award, and his comparison [316KB PDF] of environmental scientists to “fruit farmers, florists, and clockmakers” is emblematic of his flair as an educator. Fruit farmers deliver tangible, useful goods to society; the analogy in the environmental sciences would be techniques, tools, or models, he explains. Florists deliver aesthetically pleasing products, equivalent to the mechanistic underpinnings of chemical interactions that a scientist might elucidate.
In his work, Hermens has been both a florist and a farmer, so to speak. “In the past, we did a lot of work on trying to develop models to predict ecotoxicity or bioaccumulation in organisms,” he says. His research group works on distinguishing general modes of action in ecotoxicology and developing models for predicting ecosystem effects of so-called baseline toxicants; their results have been routinely applied in regulating new and existing chemicals in Europe. Hermens has coauthored >140 peer-reviewed research publications and has served as the head of 2 European Commission projects, on fate and transport of pollutants and quantitative methods of tracking them.
More recently, Hermens’s work has shifted to quantifying the actual exposure in dose–effect relationships with whole organisms, as well as in cellular bioassays. Bioavailability in natural environments remains key, he comments. “I think we can still gain a lot of insight” into how toxics stay available to different life forms, a topic that may have been ignored in the past decade, in his estimation.
Now, Hermens says, the real challenge is clockmaking. An environmental clock, he explains, can be fixed by looking at the whole picture and determining the mechanistic components and how they work together over time. Hermens urges his fellow researchers to be clockmakers who consider whole ecosystems and integrate their multiple components.
“I’m really interested in things that are more mechanistics-based or processes-oriented, where people try to understand what is going on at the molecular level and at the same time, at the individual, population, and ecosystems level,” Hermens says.
