When Dr. Frank Keppler was ten years old, he told his mother that someday he wanted to be a scientist. Looking back on it now, the 39-year-old recipient of this year’s European Young Investigator Award says he believes there is no special reason why someone would become a scientist: “You’re either curious to investigate unknown fields or you aren’t.”

Keppler most certainly falls into the former category. Training initially as a geologist, he has always been interested in the history of the Earth and its development. It was no coincidence then, that his studies started to focus on the causes and effects of global warming.

Starting his scientific career in 1997 as a PhD fellow in organic geochemistry at the Centre of Excellence in Heidelberg, he remained in the city for his post-doctoral work at the Graduate College of Earth Sciences. In 2002, he left Germany for Northern Ireland to become a Marie Curie fellow at Queen’s University in Belfast. It was while working at the School of Agriculture and Food Science at Queen’s that Keppler and his team made the discovery that would ultimately lead to his receipt of this prestigious scientific award.

His team found that ageing plants provide most of the chloromethane found in the atmosphere. Because methane (like chloromethane) is released during the burning of biomass, they started to wonder whether intact plants would also release methane. So is it possible that plants are giving off a greenhouse gas like methane? The answer is yes, but what is still unknown is the exact effect this has on the climate.

Returning in 2004 to take up his current position as Research Associate at Heidelberg’s Max-Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics, Keppler submitted a proposal to the European Young Investigator Awards scheme to look into this further.

Keppler felt there were important unanswered questions that, with funding, he could explore in greater depth. He says that the aim of the new project is to “assess more accurately the contribution to climate change made by these biospheric climate-relevant volatile organic compounds.”

Keppler explains that while attention has previously focused mainly on rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels as the primary contributor to global warming, the role of secondary climate feedback elements (such as organic trace gases within the biosphere) have yet to be given proper consideration.

The award scheme – worth up to €1,250,000 – was developed in 2003 as a collaboration between the European Heads of Research Councils and the European Science Foundation. It is funded by organizations across Europe, including Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft DFG and Max-Planck in Germany.

The program is designed to help outstanding young scientists from around the world form their own research teams at European centres. Keppler’s team of three scientists are slated to work on the project over a five-year period.
 

Source: www.young-germany.de