Environmental Chemistry (MSc)

Environmental Chemistry addresses today's global challenges caused by increasing industrialisation and over-exploitation of natural resources. Contamination is seldom restricted to one compartment (air, soil, or water), but affects whole ecosystems and often has a considerable political dimension. The key to future sustainable resource management, current impact prediction, and prudent clean-up of past contaminated sites is a solid understanding of environmental chemistry. The internationally-oriented Master's programme in Environmental Chemistry is interdisciplinary in nature. It is structured in individual modules that focus on the environmental compartments air (A), soil (S), and water (W) as well as on chemical modelling, analytics, and toxicology (chemistry and analytics C), experimental biogeochemistry (EB) and isotope geochemistry (ISO). Additionally, integrative and methodological modules (M) and electives (E) are offered. In the two-year Master's programme, you learn to address global environmental chemical challenges with knowledge, skills, and experience from an application-oriented and strongly interdisciplinary perspective. Aside from the core understanding of processes in air, soil, and water, subjects include inorganic and organic chemistry, microbiology, toxicology, ecosystem analysis, and human-environment interactions. Exercises in small groups enable hands-on experience of the front-end analytical techniques in the individual research groups and development of solution-oriented thinking and creativity. You are trained in critical reflection, abstraction, and logical argumentation as well as oral and written communication. Different perceptions of environmental challenges by students from different countries at different stages of development and with different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds are integrated to sharpen understanding of international contexts. A detailed module handbook is provided for an overview of content and the qualification objectives of all modules, as well as the credits to be acquired as a measure of the workload and a description of the type of assessment components required for the award of credits.