Moritz

Upon graduation [PhD (Biogeochemistry) at the UK National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, UK], Moritz accepted a lectureship position at Swinburne Sarawak where he initially helped to established the BSc (Biotechnology) program and later set up the Aquatic and Environmental Sciences (AquES) Research Group. He has been teaching over ten years now and supervised 15 MSc and 8 P.hD. students to completion.

Malaysian Borneo is undergoing rapid large-scale conversions including clearing of wetlands to develop aquaculture and urbanisation. Moritz’s research focuses on biogeochemical cycles in the Anthropocene, mainly greenhouse gases, dissolved organic and inorganic carbon, environmental microbiology, nutrients, and trace metals. His collaborative work has been published in Nature Communications, Science Advances, as well as other A* journals such as Nature Scientific Reports and Global Change Biology. He is Guest Associate Editor for Marine Ecosystem Ecology and Review Editor for Coastal Ocean Processes in Frontiers in Marine Sciences and also Frontiers Topic Editor (Tropical Blue Carbon).

Over the past five years, Moritz secured national and international grants totaling close to ten million AUD as Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator. His latest projects are funded by the Australian Academy of Sciences (with CSIRO, development of remote sensing algorithms for dissolved organic carbon and establishment of a DataCube), the UK GCRF (with UEA; establishment of a centre in Kuching to analyse microplastics in Borneo) and the UK+Singapore NERC/NSF under the South East Asia Plastics (SEAP) program.

Moritz has represented Malaysia at international meetings such as the multilateral Coral Triangle Initiative or the IMBeR Continental Margins Working Group, a core project of the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR) and Future Earth. He has also been appointed the Sarawak node of the Malaysian Society of Marine Sciences.