Dr. Florian Meirer is Assistant Professor in the Inorganic Chemistry and Catalysis group of the Department of Chemistry at Utrecht University. His current research focuses on the development and application of 2-D and 3-D spectro-microscopic techniques for the study of hierarchically complex porous functional materials and environmental analysis with particular emphasis on chemometric methods, data mining, and network analysis. In 2019 he obtained an NWO Science PPP Fund – LIFT grant, together with Prof. P. Bruijnincx, an NWO Open Competition Domain Science – XS grant, together with Dr. Rupert Holzinger, followed by an NWO ENW Groot grant in 2020 as a co-PI together with Prof. Weckhuysen, Dr. Erik van Sebille, Dr. Irene Groot, and Prof. Linda Amaral-Zettler to study the origin, structure, and fate of nanoplastics in the ocean. Dr. Meirer is a member of the reviewing panels at the Stanford Synchrotron (SSRL) and the Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron (DESY). In the context of the analysis of sub-micron sized plastic particles (‘nanoplastics’) his current research efforts focus on the development and application of photo-induced force microscopy (PiFM) and other highly sensitive methods to detect, characterize, and quantify nanoplastics in matrices found in the environment (ranging from water to air to complex matrices such as blood and tissue).