International Eurasian Academy of Sciences, IEAS

Academician

Henrik Skov

Profile:

Elected Academician of the International Eurasian Academy of Sciences on 13 September 2017, Professor Henrik Skov is a distinguished Danish atmospheric chemist and an internationally recognised scholar of long-range transported pollutants in the Arctic. Born on 1 December 1962, he graduated in Chemistry and Physics from Odense University, now the University of Southern Denmark, in 1988 and received his Ph.D. in Atmospheric Chemistry from the same institution in 1992. He conducted the experimental research for both his Master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy. After serving as Assistant Professor at Odense University from 1992 to 1993, he joined Denmark’s National Environmental Research Institute (NERI) as a Senior Scientist. Following the integration of NERI into Aarhus University in 2007, he advanced to Principal Scientist and was subsequently appointed Professor in the Department of Environmental Science. Since 2001, he has also served as Adjunct Professor at the University of Southern Denmark. He is the founding Scientific Head of the Villum Research Station at Station Nord in north-eastern Greenland, established in 2015 through a €9.3 million grant from the Villum Foundation. Located at 81°36′ N, the station has become one of the world’s northernmost year-round research platforms and serves as Denmark’s contribution to the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP).

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Professor Skov’s research has focused on the transport, transformation, and deposition of mercury, persistent organic pollutants, and aerosols in the High Arctic atmosphere, with particular emphasis on atmospheric mercury depletion events, biogenic and anthropogenic sources of Arctic aerosols, and the influence of short-lived climate forcers on regional climate. Through long-term observations at Station Nord, he has advanced understanding of the temporal variability of gaseous elemental mercury, the contribution of organic biogenic aerosols to Arctic cloud condensation nuclei during summer, and the relationship between aerosol size distributions and chemical composition in the European High Arctic. He has authored 109 peer-reviewed publications, with an h-index of 35 and more than 3,300 citations, including a paper published in Geophysical Research Letters. He has also served as principal author of a major report for the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) on atmospheric mercury, contributing scientific evidence to international efforts to control mercury pollution. His selected works examine long-term variability in gaseous elemental mercury at Station Nord, the contribution of organic biogenic aerosols to Arctic cloud condensation nuclei, aerosol size distributions and chemical composition in the European High Arctic, biogenic and anthropogenic aerosol sources at the Villum Research Station, and gaseous elemental mercury fluxes during atmospheric mercury depletion events. Collectively, these contributions reflect a sustained research programme linking fundamental atmospheric chemistry with long-term Arctic observation and the scientific assessment of pollutant transport, environmental change, and climate impacts in the rapidly changing Arctic environment.