Dirk Sachse has been appointed Professor of Organic Geochemistry of the Earth's Surface System at the Department of Geography at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. In addition to his work as a research group leader for the Organic Surface Geochemistry Laboratory, he is also the director of Topic 5 "Landscapes of the Future - Preserving Biodiversity, Water Resources and Ecosystems".  Currently, Dirk Sachse is researching, among other things, how humans have shaped fluvial landscapes over the last 5,000 years and how these changes influence the carbon storage capacity of the landscape and thus the carbon cycle.

Dirk Sachse studied geology in Jena and Spain and did his doctorate at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena until 2005. He then worked as a postdoc at MIT in Cambridge and the University of Washington in Seattle in the USA until he came to the University of Potsdam in 2007. There he led an Emmy-Noether junior research group from 2009-2014. Since 2014, he has been a senior scientist at the GFZ and directs the Organic Surface Geochemistry Laboratory in Section 4.6 Geomorphology.