Welte, Caro

I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Biogeoscience Group (Dept. Earth Sciences) and the Laboratory of Ion Beam Physics (Dept. Physics) at ETH Zurich. My main interest is the interdisciplinary research tailoring radiocarbon (¹⁴C) analysis using Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) and its applications in biogeosciences. Another focus of my work lies in the analysis of (ultra-) small ¹⁴C samples in order to push ¹⁴C gas measurement towards new frontiers.

Research area

My research is multidisciplinary combining analytical methods and instrumental developments in the field of radiocarbon analysis for applications in very different research areas. I am currently supervising three PhD students who are working within this interdisciplinary research line. Our specific research interests are
• Laser Ablation - AMS for online radiocarbon analysis in speleothems
• Carbon isotopes in speleothems for ecosystem reconstruction
• Using flow cytometry in the context of geochemistry
• Radiocarbon in the carbon cycle

CV

Radionuclides fascinated me ever since my first contact within my diploma thesis at the Institute of Environmental Physics (University of Heidelberg, Germany), where I got involved in the use of stalagmites as climate archives by studying the complex processes above caves using 36Cl (Münsterer et al. 2012). This project brought me to ETH Zurich, where I did my PhD thesis under the supervision of Prof. Detlef Günther and Prof. Hans-Arno Synal with the goal to develop a novel online sample introduction system for 14C measurements using laser ablation (LA) coupled with AMS (Münsterer et al. 2014, Welte et al. 2016a). The new LA-AMS system has been applied in a range of collaborations to very different samples covering stalagmites, corals, shells and fish ear stones (Welte et al 2016b, Welte et al 2017).
Following up on my PhD I focused on setting up analytical strategies that allowed streamlining processes for high-through put 14C analysis in the biomedical field. As an Oberassistant in the Biogeoscience Group, I got involved in small-scale 14C analysis using gas ion source AMS, which is the basis for innovative instrumental approaches such as using a flow cytometer for sorting of pollen or coccoliths.
 

Contact

ETH Zurich
Professur für Biogeowissenschaften
Dr. Caroline Welte
Geologisches InstitutNO
G 57
Sonneggstrasse 5
8092 Zürich
Switzerland
ETH Zürich

Department of Earth Sciences

+41 44 633 20 41