Christian E.W. Steinberg, educated as ecologist, is interested in pure and applied limnology, particularly aquatic organisms and their nutrition as well as the action of natural aquatic xenobiotic substances. Particularly, humic substances and their long-term impact in entire lake systems as well as their short-term and transgenerational effect in fishes and aquatic invertebrates have been and continue to be studied. Consequently, in 2003, he published the highly acclaimed Ecology of Humic Substances in Freshwater with Springer. The continuation of this research interest led to the identification of beneficial effects of natural mild environmental stresses, for instance, by dissolved humic substances, as ecological driving force and the publication of the 2012 Springer book Stress Ecology. In 2018, he began publishing the Aquatic Animal Nutrition series with Springer with "A Mechanistic Perspective from Individuals to Generations" (2018) and "Organic Macro- and Micro-Nutrients" (2022).In 1995, he was appointed chairholder of freshwater ecology at Humboldt University in Berlin and, for 10 years, director of the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, Berlin, Germany. He has published more than three hundred papers in peer-reviewed journals and was frequently appointed guest professor at Salzburg University (Austria), Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), Huazhong Agricultural University Wuhan (China), and, since 2009 permanently, Kunming University of Science and Technology (China).
