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Meret Aeppli

EPFL Valais Wallis
EPFL ENAC IIE SOIL
Route des Ronquos 86
1951 Sion

Expertise

soil chemistry, redox reactions, biogeochemistry
Meret Aeppli joined EPFL as a tenure track assistant professor and head of the soil biogeochemistry laboratory (SOIL) in September 2022. Her group aims to elucidate the fundamental principles and mechanisms of electron transfer reactions and their role in the biogeochemical cycling of carbon and metals in soil. Meret was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University in the department of Earth System Science from 2019 to 2022 where she studied biogeochemical controls on carbon turnover in soils and sediments. She holds a Bachelor's and a Master's degree in Environmental Sciences from ETH Zurich and obtained her PhD from ETH Zurich in 2018. She was awarded the ETH Medal for her dissertation work in which she developed novel approaches to quantify the redox properties and reactivities of iron minerals.

Awards

Jin Jingfu Memorial Lecture Award

International Association of Geochemistry

2024

ETH Medal for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis

ETH Zürich

2019

Selected publications

Climate change impacts on organic carbon cycling in European alpine soils

K. Bright, B. Dienes, M. Keiluweit, C. Rixen, M. Aeppli
Published in Soil Biology and Biochemistry in 2025

Soil carbon concentration drives anoxic microsites across horizons, textures, and aggregate position in a California grassland

Emily M. Lacroix, Anna Gomes, Alexander S. Honeyman, Katie R. Huy, Scott Fendorf, Vincent Noël, Meret Aeppli
Published in Geoderma in 2025

Research

Current Research Fields

Soil chemistry

PhD Students

Bence Dienes, Camila Morales Undurraga, Kristina Bright, Emma Lorraine Defrang

Courses

Environmental chemistry

ENV-200

This course provides students with an overview over the basics of environmental chemistry. This includes the chemistry of natural systems, as well as the fate of anthropogenic chemicals in natural systems. It enables students to apply general chemical concepts to natural systems.

Fate and behaviour of environmental contaminants

ENV-507

The student will learn the important processes that control the transport and transformation of organic chemicals in the environment, as well as the formulation and solution of quantitative models to describe these processes.