Roger Seco Guix

Roger Seco joined IDAEA in December 2021 with a Talent Attraction contract in the frame of the Severo Ochoa project, in 2022 started a Ramón y Cajal contract, and in 2024 became a tenured scientist. He obtained his PhD at CREAF (Barcelona) before working at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University of California Irvine (USA), and between 2018 and 2021 as an Assistant Professor at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark). His research has focused on the biogenic emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and how these are affected by temperature and drought stress in a variety of ecosystems ranging from northern tundra to Amazonian rain forests. In addition, he has studied how these VOCs affect the ecological communication between organisms and how they alter the atmospheric chemistry. He is an expert in analyzing the constituents of the atmosphere with online mass spectrometry, in particular with proton transfer reaction mass spectrometry (PTR-MS) and in combining PTR-MS with the eddy covariance technique to measure ecosystem-scale fluxes of VOCs. At IDAEA, in addition to working on biogenic VOC flux studies, he plans on applying the expertise gained in natural sites to the urban environment – to measure the fluxes of trace gases and particles, i.e., how the city breathes.