Jaap Sinninghe Damsté

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Jaap Sinninghe Damsté

Jaap Sinninghe Damsté (born January 1, 1959 in Baarn ) is a Dutch geochemist , paleoclimatologist and microbiologist .

Life

Damsté studied chemical engineering and environmental chemistry at the TU Delft with a degree in 1984 and received a doctorate in organic geochemistry in 1988. Since 2002 he has been Head of Marine Biogeochemistry and Toxicology at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Marine Research in Den Burg and since 2003 Professor of Molecular Paleontology at the University of Utrecht , where he has been researching since 1993. This year he started his research group Molecular Paleontology of Marine Sediments with a pioneer grant from the NWO .

He studied chemical fossils in sediments to reconstruct climate (sea temperature, TEX86 ) and the life of microbes in the earth's past. In his dissertation he discovered large amounts of previously undiscovered organic sulfur compounds in sediments and crude oil, which led to a revision of the view of the global sulfur cycle. He later discovered the widespread distribution of archaea (not only in extreme environmental conditions) and that, like plants, they absorb carbon dioxide from the air to grow, with effects on the global carbon cycle. He also discovered the role of anammox bacteria and archaea in the nitrogen cycle of the oceans.

In 2004 he received the Spinoza Prize and in 2007 the Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky Medal . He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences . In 2008 he received an Advanced Grant from the ERC and in 2014 the AH-Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences .

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