**Meet the editor**

Dr. Maria C. Hernández-Soriano is a UQ Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Queensland. She received her PhD degree in 2009 from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) within an international agreement with the Spanish National Research Council. Her research addressed mobility and bioavailability of pesticides and heavy metals in relevant environmental scenarios such as

agricultural wastewater-irrigated soils or heavy metal contaminated soils. She continued her research as postdoctoral at the KULeuven. In 2010-2011 she visited North Carolina State University (USA) as a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow and conducted research in carbon sequestration by metal complexation. Since 2011 her research has focused on the characterization of functional pools of carbon in soil by spectroscopic techniques.
