International Eurasian Academy of Sciences, IEAS

Academician

Martin Heimann

Profile:

Elected Academician of the International Eurasian Academy of Sciences on 8 July 2015, Professor Martin Heimann is a Swiss-born German biogeochemist and one of the principal architects of modern global carbon-cycle science. Born in Bern, Switzerland, on 1 March 1949, he earned his diploma and Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Bern in 1978 and 1982, respectively. His early research career began at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla (1982–1985), where he worked in the group of Charles David Keeling, before moving to the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg (1985–1998), where he served as Senior Research Scientist and Workgroup Leader under Klaus Hasselmann. Joining the newly established Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena in 1998, he became Director of the Department of Biogeochemical Systems in 2003 and held the position until 2017; he now serves as Director Emeritus. Since 2017, he has also been Research Director at the Institute for Atmospheric and Earth System Research (INAR), University of Helsinki. A Member of Academia Europaea since 1998, he contributed as a Lead Author to five successive assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), sharing in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, and received the A. M. Obukhov Medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2017.

Back to list page →

His research has centred on the observation, analysis, and modelling of the global carbon cycle and its interaction with the physical climate system, with particular emphasis on long-lived biogeochemical trace gases and the development of global, continental, and regional observing systems. He pioneered the Carbon Cycle Data Assimilation System (CCDAS), integrating atmospheric, terrestrial, and oceanic observations with process-based models to constrain carbon fluxes and their feedbacks within the climate system. Through his coordination of CarboEurope-IP and the Siberian Terrestrial Carbon Observing System, he has played a major role in developing the scientific infrastructure for international carbon-cycle monitoring. Author of 269 peer-reviewed publications, with an h-index of 77, more than 21,500 citations, and twenty papers in Nature and Science, his work ranks among the most influential contributions to contemporary Earth system science. The five selected publications from 2019—covering the FLUXNET-CH₄ synthesis of methane observations, high-precision greenhouse-gas measurements at Ambarchik on the Siberian coast, air–sea carbon fluxes in the Benguela upwelling system, calibration of stomatal-conductance parameters in the JSBACH land-surface model, and the recent weakening of net carbon uptake across northern high latitudes under warming—illustrate the breadth of his continuing contribution to quantifying biosphere–atmosphere exchange and assessing its vulnerability to climate change.