Christian Krohn

An early career researcher whose interests could be summed up with: “Environmental sequencing, microbial ecology, chlorinated pollutants, organic matter, wastewater, anaerobic digestion, and how everything connects".

In 2021 I joined the ARC Biosolids Training Centre at RMIT (www.transformingbiosolids.org.au), where we help water utilities to improve circular resource management by getting more renewable biogas and carbon/fertiliser values out of our municipal biosolids. In project 1C of the Centre we develop metagenomic methods to monitor the microbiome of anaerobic digestion, an important microbial treatment process for wastewater. DNA-based diagnoses of wastewater sludges promises to help the water/biosolids sector improve resource recoveries and risk management.

Before that, after a career in one of the most fast-cycled and short-sighted manufacturing industries that took me from Germany to Vietnam and Hong Kong/Shenzhen, I decided to hit the switch and start thinking long-term and circular. Ten back-to-uni years later, in 2021 I finished a PhD in Soil Science at La Trobe Uni where I sequenced soil DNA and explored if and how soil biology was involved in the degradation of extremely persistent legacy pesticides that contaminate agricultural surface soils since several decades.