Dr. Hendryk Czech

Hendryk Czech received his PhD (with honors) in Chemistry from the University of Rostock in the group of Prof. Ralf Zimmermann. During his work as a PhD student, he was part of a DACH project with the Paul Scherrer Institute and also part of the Helmholtz Virtual Institute for Complex Molecular Systems in Environmental Health (HICE). In 2018, he joined Prof. Olli Sippula's group at the University of Eastern Finland in Kuopio and conducted research on laboratory aging of combustion aerosols. In 2019, he returned to the University of Rostock as a postdoctoral fellow and became project leader at Helmholtz Munich of the German-Israeli Helmholtz International Laboratory aeroHEALTH, consisting of the Cooperations Group Comprehensive Molecular Analytics (CMA at Helmholtz Munich) and Institute of Computational Biology (ICB at Helmholtz Munich), as well as the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and Forschungszentrum Jülich.

Hendryk's research is in the area of environment and health and aims to link chemical-physical properties of aerosols with biological effects in cell and animal models. Understanding the biological mechanisms triggered by air pollution is of great interest and critical to improving public health by regulating air pollutants, such as NO2 and respirable particulate matter (PM2.5), to reduce cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, and cancer. Hendryk's new research approach considers the effects of atmospheric chemistry on the toxicity of aerosols, which can degrade pollutants or form new harmful substances, and combines data from aerosol chemistry, physics, and biology with machine learning techniques and network algorithms.