Mattias von Brömssen, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)

Mattias von Brömssen, Department of Land and Water Resources Engineering, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, defended his doctoral dissertation entitled ”Hydrogeological and geochemical assessment of aquifer systems with geogenic arsenic in Southeastern Bangladesh – Targeting low arsenic aquifers for safe drinking water supplies in Matlab” on Friday 20 January 2012. The faculty opponent was Professor David Polya, University of Manchester, United Kingdom.
The thesis covers a crucial period of the work on the arsenic problems in groundwater in Bangladesh. Especially it includes the discovery of the local drillers ́ strategy to find low iron groundwater by assessing the colour of the sediments. With the link between mobilisation of arsenic along with iron which was published by a KTH team in 1997 this gave an immediate hint on means of predicting arsenic low groundwater during well construction. The strategy was discovered by the author of the thesis when he was advising a M.Sc. thesis project. More information.
Read the full dissertation (as a pdf-file)