Daniela Sauer studied ecology, with focus on soil science, at the University of Essen. Her master thesis on silica and zeolites in Technosols was supervised by Prof. Wolfgang Burghardt. She got her PhD in Physical Geography at the Universities of Giessen and Marburg under supervision of Prof. Peter Felix-Henningsen, chair of the German Paleopedology group. Her PhD thesis was on Pleistocene periglacial slope deposits in the Rhenish Massif, Germany (SAUER & FELIX-HENNINGSEN, 2004: J. Plant Nutr. Soil Sci., 167: 752 – 760). After her PhD, she moved to Hohenheim University to work in the group of Prof. Karl Stahr at the Soil Science Institute. She built up a little research team focussing mainly on two topics: 1. soil development with time in dateable parent materials and 2. different silica fractions in soils. This team has studied soil chronosequences in coastal areas of Patagonia (SAUER & SCHELLMANN, 2007: Catena, in print), Norway (SAUER et al., 2007: J. Plant Nutr. Soil Sci., accepted), southern Italy and Sicily (WAGNER et al., 2007: Revista mexicana de ciencias geológicas, accepted). Currently, a project to continue the research in southern Italy and Sicily has been accepted by the German Research Foundation (DFG). She worked on improving methodologies for Si extraction from soils (SAUER et al., 2006: Biogeochemistry, 80, 1: 89-108), which is also the aim of an ongoing DFG project. In a previous DFG project (2004 - 2006), silica accumulations in soils of Portugal and Lanzarote were studied. Daniela Sauer is an active member of the IUSS Paleopedology commission and, in the last years, has been increasingly involved in the commission’s activities, e.g. by organizing the publication of conference proceedings, proposing (and chairing) a symposium “Timescales of soil formation” at the INQUA conference 2007 in Australia etc.