Ecotoxicology University of Gothenburg

Overview

Ecotoxicology from University of Gothenburg has strong connections to biology, ecology, toxicology, biochemistry, analytical and environmental chemistry, statistics, and social sciences. 

Quick Facts:

• Modern society uses more than 100,000 chemicals as pesticides, pharmaceuticals, food contact chemicals, laundry agents, and for a range of other purposes. Roughly 40 new chemicals are discovered every hour. On the one hand, all those chemicals provide us with enormous societal benefits. On the other hand, they cause massive environmental damage and have huge impacts on human health. In order to facilitate societal developments towards our ultimate goal—a “non-toxic environment”—it is critical to balance these two aspects and navigate the resulting societal and political minefield. In other words, society is crucially dependent on well-trained ecotoxicologists and chemical risk assessors to characterize, understand, and predict the effects of toxic chemicals on plant and animal populations, ecological communities, and ecosystems.
• Ecotoxicology is the science of the structures, processes, and interactions that explain how toxic compounds affect ecosystems. Our programme focusses on the fate and effects of contaminants at different levels of biological organization (molecular, cell, individual, population, community) but prioritizes the assessment of ecologically relevant processes. We introduce modern laboratory techniques (for example, molecular ecotoxicology) and use the recent advances within molecular biology and cellular physiology in order to understand and predict effects at the community level.