Plant Pathology and Crop Protection

Hon. Prof. Dr. Lennart Weltje

Positions

  • Senior regulatory ecotoxicologist in the Global Ecotoxicology Group of BASF's Agricultural Solutions Division in Limburgerhof, Germany
  • Honorary Professor at the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences of the Georg-August University in Goettingen, Germany

Research

Professor Weltje research interests include ecotoxicological risk assessment of plant protection products and biocides in the (aquatic) environment. His special interest goes out to fish, invertebrates and amphibians. Another focus is endocrine disruption in these taxonomic groups. In the past he has worked on the ecotoxicology of (heavy) metal mixtures in soil. His PhD thesis was on aquatic ecotoxicology and environmental chemistry of lanthanides (REEs).

Publications

Refer to the ORCID referencing system to study his academic output

Teaching

  • Ecotoxicological Risk Assessment for Plant Protection Products ( M.CP.0002)
  • Pesticides II: Toxicology, Ecotoxicology, Environmental Metabolism, Regulation and Registration ( M.CP.0007)

Curriculum vitae

  • Lennart Weltje is a senior regulatory ecotoxicologist at BASF Crop Protection in Limburgerhof, Germany. He holds a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Biology from Utrecht University in The Netherlands, and a Ph.D. in Ecotoxicology and Environmental Chemistry from the Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands, where he was also trained as a Radiation Safety Officer.

    From 1993 to 1995, he was employed at the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM, Bilthoven, The Netherlands) performing research on mixture toxicity of heavy metals and PAHs to soil invertebrates.
    In 2001, he received a 2-year EU Marie-Curie postdoc fellowship to do research on endocrine disruption in freshwater invertebrates at the International Graduate School (IHI) in Zittau, Germany.

    In 2004, he started working for BASF, where he is responsible for aquatic risk assessments of plant protection products. Lennart’s areas of expertise include endocrine disruption, mixture toxicity, amphibian toxicology, sediment and aquatic invertebrates.

    Lennart is a member of the endocrine disruption expert groups of CropLife Europe, ECETOC and the SETAC Advisory Group on Endocrine Disruptor Testing and Risk Assessment. For two years he represented industry in the ECHA Endocrine Disruption Expert Group. At OECD, he is a BIAC member of the ad hoc invertebrate expert group and was involved in toxicity test guideline development for duckweed, chironomids and freshwater snails. Since 2011 he is chairman of the annual Fresenius Conference on Endocrine Disruption. In 2011, he started lecturing Regulatory Ecotoxicology of Pesticides at the University of Göttingen in Germany, where he became an honorary professor in 2018.

    Lennart is a co-author of around 80 peer-reviewed papers (for his full publication list see: www.researchgate.net/profile/Lennart_Weltje).